


What Isn't There (I Hope I Never Know)

by commoncomitatus



Category: Warehouse 13
Genre: Angst, F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-01
Updated: 2012-07-17
Packaged: 2017-11-10 03:02:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 60,408
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/461515
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/commoncomitatus/pseuds/commoncomitatus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>S2-3 bridge, picking up immediately after Reset. Claudia struggles to deal with the fallout of everything that's happened.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Only Constant

\--- 

As soon as they get back to the B&B, Claudia storms upstairs to her room.

She doesn’t care that she’s acting like a little kid (like a brat, even), or that she’s leaving Pete and Artie and Leena to deal with all the fallout of everything that’s just gone down, or that she’s probably the most selfish human being on the whole fracking planet right now. She doesn't care about anything at all.

When she gets there, she slams the door as hard as she can, relishing the way the framework shakes. It’s just a moment, a fleeting half-second of pure rage where she lets out all of the violence that’s been simmering inside her head and hopes it’ll be scared right out of her. It should work, but it doesn’t; the sound is as explosive as she is, violent and shot through with pain, but it doesn’t feel nearly as good as she wants it to.

What comes next is reflexive, intuitive. It comes from a place deep in her, a sacred place that no-one can touch.

For all the violence spinning circles round her mind, she doesn’t scream; for all the pain kicking at her heart, she doesn’t cry. The sound of the slamming door resonates, impossibly tempting in the still air, but she doesn’t do it again. She doesn’t indulge any of the violent, angry, wounded impulses alight in her.

Instead, she crosses over to the bed, picks up her guitar, and lets herself fall back.

She doesn’t let herself think about what she’s playing, but then, the music comes so naturally that she doesn’t have to; it’s why she’s drawn to it, the not-needing-to-think, the automatic instinct of the sound as it wraps itself around her no matter what she’s feeling. So she plays without thought, lets the rhythm and the words direct her, lets them shut off all her thought.

At first, she plays “Jesus Doesn’t Want Me For A Sunbeam”, in the style of Nirvana. It’s typical, she knows, a staple of teenage angst for nearly a decade, but she doesn’t care about the cliché. She just cares about how it makes her feel. Soft and low, sad and raw, over and over and over again, until her fingers are raw and calloused and sore, until anyone with any sense of self-preservation would stop, and then a couple more times after that, just for good measure.

It’s just one more breed of pain, but at least this one is welcome.

Even after she’s exhausted the Nirvana, though, she doesn’t stop; she just switches up to something else. She can’t recall the name of the song off-hand, but it’s loud and it’s brutal, and it tears up her hands in the most perfect way. It hurts like hell, but it hurts so damn good. So, yeah, she cranks up the tempo and the volume, cranks up everything she can, cranks it all right up to eleven. Plays until her shaking fingers can’t find purchase through the blood on the strings, and keeps on going.

The knock at her door (some time in the evening, she guesses by the colour of the fading sunlight outside her window) doesn’t stop her.

It’ll be Leena, she knows, ready with a mouthful of sympathetically saccharine chastisements, telling her to keep the noise down, tactfully reminding her that they all have to share the living space, and insisting that she be considerate of others... and, honest-to-whatever, Claudia doesn’t trust herself not to lose it if she has to deal with that.

She doesn’t trust the music to keep doing its job, to keep her calm, if she’s distracted by external annoyances – and especially Leena, who can drive her to that point even on a good day. So, because it’s the safest option for them both, she ignores her. She keeps herself safe, locked up inside her sanctuary of rhythm and backbeat, rage-spat lyrics that make no sense and split-open fingers. Keeps right on playing, clinging to the slippery lifeline through the bloodstained strings.

It won’t deter Leena, she knows, but it’ll give them both a few minutes (or even just a few seconds, if the goddamned woman can even wait that long) before the explosions start. It’ll keep her soul strong, even as her fingers get weaker.

“Claudia?”

She stops playing, then, because she has to. Leena might as well have yanked the guitar out of her hands for all the choice she’s giving her now.

“Go away,” she growls, deep and low and dangerous

It’s as close to a warning as she’s ever going to give, but Leena (because she’s Leena) naturally takes it as an invitation to come right on in, and never mind little things like personal space or basic common decency.

“Dinner’s ready.”

Claudia stares, mouth half-open in disgusted disbelief. She can’t possibly have heard that correctly, she decides; not even Leena would be that obliviously stupid. “Are you kidding?”

Leena frowns; she’s actually genuinely confused by the question, like she seriously doesn’t realise that she’s just said the most ridiculously stupid thing in the whole freakin’ universe. So, yeah, maybe she really is that obliviously stupid.

“Not that I’m aware of,” she says, guarded but sincere.

Claudia laughs; it sounds dangerous, too, almost more than the growl. She’s right on the brink of mania, dancing on the knife-edge, and she swore she’d never let herself feel like this again.

“Yeah, well. Shockingly, Leena, I’m not hungry.”

“I didn’t think you would be. But it’s there if you change your mind.”

Claudia bites her tongue at that, hard enough that the metallic taste in her mouth resonates with the blood on her hands; Leena means well, she knows, but that doesn’t stop her wanting to tear her to pieces.

“Got it,” she grates out through gritted teeth. “See ya.”

Leena sighs; she doesn’t say anything about the noise, but Claudia knows better than to expect that she’ll just turn around and leave her alone like a normal person, especially after she’s been actively dismissed. In Leena!speak, Claudia muses angrily, even flat-out saying _‘go the hell away’_ is pretty much an open invitation to stay forever.

“Claudia...” She takes a breath, like she’s bracing herself, and oh God, if she asks whether she’s ‘all right’, Claudia really is going to lose it.

“What?” she huffs, trying hopelessly to pre-empt the inevitable.

Leena sighs softly, evidently sensing the danger in her, and tangibly switches to a different tack. “You’re bleeding.”

Claudia doesn’t even glance down at her shredded fingers. “So?”

Leena sighs a second time, and this time, there’s active frustration in the sound. Apparently, though, she knows better than to draw the usual lines of sympathy with Claudia when she’s in this kind of mood, because she doesn’t even waste her breath trying with sugar-coated placations or offerings of unwanted support. She just shrugs, like she doesn’t even care at all, and says, “So you’ll ruin your strings if you keep that up.”

“I don’t care,” Claudia snaps, petulant.

“Maybe not now,” Leena concedes kindly, “but you will the next time you want to play that thing.” She takes a step forwards, tentative but determined, like she can tell that Claudia’s sharpening her teeth to bite her head off but isn’t willing to let that stop her doing what she wants. “Here, let me just...”

“Back off,” Claudia warns darkly. “I swear to God, Leena, if you touch me right now...”

Leena studies her, long and hard, and Claudia recognises (and loathes) the look on her face. She’s reading her aura, or her colours, or whatever the hell she’s decided to call it this week, no doubt trying to figure out whether the threat is an empty one or whether it actually carries honest weight.

“I’ll take my chances,” she says after a moment, and, much as Claudia hates it, that’s the answer right there. “Hold still.”

“I hate you,” Claudia blurts out. She sounds like a brat, and, like a rage-beaten teenager, she’s startled by how completely she means it; the violent impulses are sharp and unfettered within her, potent and wild, and, right now, the words are true. Right now, she honestly does hate her. Real, true, brutal hate.

“I know,” Leena says softly; though there’s no way that she can’t sense the force of Claudia’s fury, she’s infuriatingly unfazed. “But you hate everything right now, so at least I’m in good company.”

Claudia doesn’t say anything else, but she stubbornly refuses to hold still. It’s not much of a rebellion, as rebellions go, but it’s the only one she’s got. She fidgets and complains and growls and generally acts like the worst person ever while Leena fixes up her hands like a friggin’ day-care nurse, whipping out brightly-coloured band-aids seemingly from out of nowhere (and Claudia tries not to think about where she was hiding them now that they’re on her fingers) with scarily well-practiced efficiency.

Ever the paragon of patience and virtue, Leena doesn’t speak, and she definitely doesn’t rise to the bait of Claudia’s antagonistic comments. She just carries on, does what she wants like everything’s okay, like it’s all fine, like it’s just another day. Like the world didn’t just almost end, like HG wasn’t evil all along, like Artie didn’t almost die, like Myka didn’t just freaking abandon them. 

“There,” she says when she’s finished. “Is that better?”

“Oh yeah,” Claudia snaps, the feint at sarcasm lost to the overpowering rage. “It’s all great now. It’s all _awesome_. HG almost destroyed the world, or at least a whole massive chunk of it, and Artie almost died again, and one day that’s gonna be a permanent thing, and Myka’s gone, and probably isn’t ever gonna come back, and nothing’s ever gonna be like it was... but, hey, check it, I got a Mickey Mouse band-aid. So, obviously, everything is _all better now_.”

Leena’s hands are impossibly gentle when they wrap around her wrists, stilling her, but Claudia refuses to let herself take comfort in the contact.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“Do I want to...?” Claudia echoes, horrified. “ _No_ , Leena, I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t want... I just... I just wanna...” Furiously defiant, she yanks her arms free, picks up the guitar again, and strums a couple of angrily experimental notes. It’s completely off-key now, but she doesn’t care. “I just want to play. I just wanna crash here and play till your stupid band-aids fall off and you gotta give ’em stitches instead. That’s what I want. So can I just do that now, please?”

There’s sorrow and regret alight behind Leena’s eyes, but also a frustrating kind of empathy – of understanding – and Claudia finds that she’s not so surprised as she should be when Leena just offers her a sad little nod and turns back towards the door.

“I’ll keep a plate warm for you,” she says simply. “In case you get hungry later.”

And then, in a heartbeat, Claudia is alone again, with her pain and her anger and her guitar and only the band-aids on her fingers to mark the fact that anyone else was ever there at all.

\--- 

Some hours later, when the evening has well and truly given in to the dark of night, she finally ventures out of her room.

The B&B is really quiet, almost deserted. She figures Artie’s probably back at the Warehouse, like he usually is, regardless of the fact that he almost died and should be taking it easy and resting or whatever, and Pete’s probably in bed (or else out in the field, hunting artefacts or playing basketball with himself or something equally stupid and pointless and denial-y, ’cause that’s just how he rolls). Because, hey, it’s not like the world’s just turned upside-down or anything, and why should they act like things are different?

It’s nearly a full three minutes before she stops wondering where Myka is.

Leena is standing there, in the middle of the dining room. She’s not doing anything, just waiting quietly, and the look on her face when she sees her is so unaffected that it’s almost like she knew exactly when Claudia would show up, right down to the nearest half-second. Truthfully, Claudia supposes she probably wouldn’t be all that surprised if she _did_ know. She’s just creepy that way.

This time, though, Leena doesn’t say anything. She just places a ridiculously enormous cup of coffee down on the table (without even using a coaster) and pushes it lightly towards her, a wordless offer.

Claudia doesn’t take it, and she doesn’t say ‘thank you’; in fact, she makes a conscious effort to not acknowledge the gesture at all. She just bites her lip, stares down at the carpet like it’s the most amazing thing she has ever seen. Hears her own voice rend the air, scattered fragments of lyrics from about fifteen different songs all at once, like she can somehow force them to connect with each other. Stands there for a minute or two, still as a frozen lake, just letting the emptiness wash over her.

Then, without warning, she throws herself into Leena’s arms and howls like the world really did end.

\--- 

They don’t talk about it.

Claudia doesn’t let herself break down again, or even shed a single tear in public, and Leena doesn’t offer to ‘be there’ or any other such crap that they both know Claudia wouldn’t want to hear. Neither of them talk about Myka, or about HG, or about the hole in the world where they should be. They don’t act like everything is the same as it used to be, but they don’t talk about the reasons why it isn’t, either. They just kind of continue existing.

Still, even though nothing has really changed (and the pain certainly hasn’t), Claudia stops locking herself up in her room.

She doesn’t go back to the Warehouse yet. She can’t face it, can’t go there and live out the memories that haunt her even at a distance... the revenant images of Myka’s face, her voice, the way her eyes would sparkle with enthusiasm every time they got a ping, the way she’d laughingly talk Claudia through their latest missions (because, even though she’s been out in the field herself a couple of times now, listening to stories from the proper agents is still the closest she’s going to get to real active duty). She can’t face the memories... and she definitely, definitely can’t face Artie.

It’s not his fault. It’s all her, pathetic and cowardly. She’s still too hurt and way too scared, the fear of abandonment and the fear of loss both twisting and churning inside her like a pair of snakes trying to wrestle each other to death. It makes her feel sick, actually physically sick, and she knows that if she sees Artie with that _thing_ on his arm, the symbol of what happened to him, and lets herself think about how close—

 _No_. She can’t. It’ll be the breaking of her.

So, instead, she hangs out at the B&B. Helps Leena, albeit in a kind-of sort-of not-exactly way; really, she mostly just kind of follows her around like a lost puppy, and Leena pityingly lets her vacuum the stairs and wash the dishes (but never cook; apparently, she’s not to be trusted with sharp utensils) and fold the sheets. It’s not really very different from taking inventory, and Claudia blasts her iPod loud enough to drown out everything around her and tries to let the noise and the mundanity work to suffocate the tumult in her heart.

When he gets back from his latest adventure (or wherever the hell he’s been), and they sit down for dinner, Claudia tries to get a rise out of Pete. Neither of them have really eaten anything since Myka left, and Leena crankily tells Claudia that, if she’s not going to eat the food that she’s been labouring over, then the least she can do is clear the table and wash the dishes. 

Though her heart’s not really in it, Claudia makes a whole big thing out of pointing at Pete, scowling and rolling her eyes and doing everything she can to get a reaction out of him. It’s desperate, but she can’t help thinking, if she can just get him to grin like he used to, or give her a hard time over nothing at all, or just be _Pete_ for five fracking seconds, then maybe she can pretend that everything else is the way it used to be too.

“ _He_ didn’t eat anything either...” she whines, exaggeratedly petulant, and it’s about a nanosecond too late that she realises trying to act like a child just makes her feel like one – not petulant and scowly like she’s shooting for, but small and frightened and helpless – and suddenly the tears are way, way, way too close to the surface.

“True,” Leena affirms smoothly. “But he’s been working all day.”

“Yeah, Claud,” Pete crows, but it’s too sharp and too enthusiastic to be convincing to any of them. “I’ve been working my ass off all the live-long day, while you’ve been sitting on yours. So get to steppin’, young lady.”

And, yeah, okay, so his voice is light and cool, but his eyes are hollow and empty. They’re dark and cold, sad like the way he’s sitting, weighted like her own heart, and what she’d meant to be a cute moment of casual snark between the two of them is suddenly making her swallow and bite her lips to keep from crying.

They’re both about a heartbeat away from losing it when Leena cuts in; she can see what’s coming, Claudia knows, because she can see everything, and she’s instantly in damage-control mode.

“Enough,” she says. She sounds just like a freakin’ schoolteacher, but for once the tone is a welcome one. “Claudia, clear the table. Pete, go and give Artie his pain medication. You know he gets cranky if he doesn’t get it exactly on the hour.”

She’s glaring, hands tight on her hips, but the lines on her face look more like cracks.

“Unfair,” Claudia complains, and it’s the beginning of a whimper.

“So totally,” Pete agrees, and she’s never heard his voice sound quite like that before.

Leena jabs a finger at each of them in turn; Claudia suspects that she’s probably feeling everything they are, but someone has to be the grown-up in this room. “Go! Both of you! Now!”

Claudia makes a big show of complaining and being bratty about it, but she does what she’s told anyway, and doesn’t try as hard as she normally would to make the façade stick. Behind her, she can hear Pete putting on the same fake display, though she can tell he’s just as grateful as she is for the excuse to get the hell out of there before they all fall apart.

“Man,” he grumbles. “Can’t you cut a guy some slack? Busting my ass all the live-long day, and now it’s all ‘pain medication’ this, and ‘Artie’ that...”

If she could remember how, Claudia would have laughed. As it is, she just forces back a wet cough, and elbows him (a tiny little bit too hard) in the ribs as she saunters past. He yelps in protestation, and she tells him to be faster next time, and they both sort of glare at each other, and... and it’s almost like it used to be, it’s so excruciatingly close... but there’s pain in his voice, and her lungs are screaming, and Leena’s face is cracked and rough in all the places it’s usually so soft and smooth, and everything is all so wrong. It’s all so very wrong, so far from what they need, and she can’t bear it.

To her credit, it’s only once she’s safely out of earshot, all on her own in the kitchen, that she finally gives in to the way her shoulders are shaking.

\--- 

It’s four-oh-three, and she can’t sleep.

Every time she closes her eyes, it’s like she’s there with them. Myka and HG and Artie, and she tries to shout out a warning, tries to do _something_ , but she’s always too late, always way too late... and, of course, then there’s blood everywhere and Artie’s on the floor, and there’s HG – _their_ HG, their epic and awesome and old-school badass HG – and it can’t be right, it can’t really be like what she’s seeing, except she knows that it is.

It’s not a dream (because she’s not asleep), but it feels like one. Maybe because she’s not slept at all since it happened and she’s probably a tiny bit delirious by this point, it’s kind of hard to tell. But it hurts. It hurts so bad that she wishes it really was a dream, so that, when she opens up her eyes and sees only the night-time darkness and the faint silhouette of the moon, that would mean it’s all over.

But it’s not. It’s not a dream, and it’s not over. It’s never going to be over.

The thing is, it’s nights like these – those horrible never-ending nights where she’s tossing and turning and unable to sleep because she’s being tortured and haunted and broken down by phantasmal not-quite-dreams of horrible things that shouldn’t be real but are – where she would normally go to Myka.

Because, of course, Myka was almost always awake at four-oh-three anyway. Always reading a new book or thumbing through the Warehouse manual or filling out reports or whatever. She’d always be doing something... always _there_... and, though Claudia has often found herself wondering if she ever slept at all, she’s also always been grateful that someone was awake, that she could go up to someone (not exactly whimpering, but some nights it got pretty close), desperate for human contact, and not have to wake them up.

It’s not something she’d do often. Hell to the no. But once or twice or a few times, every now and then? Yeah, it’s happened. Claudia’s lived a rough life, and she’s seen and been through too many things that nobody her age should even have to imagine, much less endure. And, yeah, okay, so there are times when that gets to her. Times when all she has to do is shut her eyes and find herself in an institution, or (in its own way, worse) in a crappy college classroom watching her brother die, or in any number of places that are so painfully real. And it’s frightening and it’s horrible, and Myka... Myka was always there. Every time it happened, every time Claudia’s demons threatened to devour her, Myka was there to chase them away.

Only now she’s not.

The whole thing is ridiculous, really, because it’s not like they’d even talk about it when it happened anyway. They didn’t even acknowledge it. Myka would just carry right on doing whatever she was doing, acting like Claudia wasn’t even there, and Claudia would curl up on the end of her bed, wrap herself up in Myka’s bedcovers, warm and safe, and just settle in. It wasn’t much, but it was all she needed. It was enough for her to just draw comfort from the flickering glow of Myka’s night-light and know that she wasn’t alone. It was enough, that comfort, to soothe her into sleep for an hour or two, and she’d wake up feeling kind of at peace, if not with the world, at least with herself. For just a brief moment, she’d be at peace.

And that right there... that’s a feeling that comes all too rarely to someone like Claudia.

Suddenly, it’s not about the way that HG was all super-evil-crazy-bad-guy, or the way that she almost killed Artie and tried to nuke the world. Suddenly, it’s about something else entirely. Suddenly, HG isn’t the epic big bad of epic big badness, like _‘I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds’_ and all of those other lame super-villain clichés. Suddenly, she’s not the viper in their midst, the cold and calloused jezebel who snuck her way into their hearts and then betrayed them all. Suddenly, as terrible as they are, those things aren’t nearly so important.

Suddenly, she’s the thing that made Myka go away.

...and suddenly, Claudia isn’t scared any more. She’s just really, really sad.

She rolls over, fast and urgent as the impulse rises up in her. Buries her face in the pillow, and bites down. It stifles the sob that wrenches out of her, and silences the guttural wail that tries to follow it, but it’s not enough to quell the rising tempest in her chest. She can keep it quiet, at least mostly, but she can’t keep it from happening, and it’s not much comfort to know that she won’t wake the others because she couldn’t stop even if she did.

It’s stupid. It’s lame, and it’s stupid, and she feels absolutely pathetic. But, of course, the problem is, feeling that way just makes her feel even worse, and the sobs intensify until the pillow is soaked right through with salt and pain.

Artie almost died. Pete lost his girlfriend and his partner, and both in the same day. Neither of them are lying awake at four-oh-three bawling like a baby. They’re not hiding out in the B&B every day, washing dishes because they’re too scared to go back to the Warehouse. They’re out there doing their goddamn jobs. Even though Artie’s still hurt and Pete’s still heartbroken, even though they’re short-handed (and all the more so with Claudia sulking around the B&B all day instead of helping like she’s supposed to), they carry on like nothing happened at all. And it’s not because they don’t want to deal with reality – it’s because the world depends on them. If they don’t do their job, people will die. And not ‘almost’, but actually. If they don’t do their jobs, people will _actually die_.

But Claudia isn’t like them. She’s not forged from the mettle of denial like Artie, and she can’t just ‘do the job’ like Pete. She can’t carry on like nothing’s happened. Hell, she still can’t even face the Warehouse. She can’t do the things they do, and the one person in all the world who kinda sorta maybe thought that one day she might be able to be like that – the one person in all the world who actually had faith in her to be more than what she is – is gone.

The thought is enough to spark another wave of tears, and even the pillow isn’t enough to fully muffle the near-inhuman sounds that tear her throat to pieces. (She won’t, she supposes as the pain hits, be doing Nirvana again any time soon.) It’s ridiculous, shameful, and yet all she can think about is how desperately she wishes that Myka were here to not-talk to her, to let her lie on her bed and curl up under the shimmering yellow-orange haze of her night-light, to just exist in the same space and let her presence be enough to make Claudia feel like she’s not alone.

It’s nearly two hours before she stops crying, the heaving sobs finally exhausting themselves and her along with them. When they do, she rolls over onto her back, lets the tears soak through into her hair, her neck, every part of her they touch, branding her skin and her soul. She stares up at the ceiling, at the flawless white paint, thinks about Myka’s night-light, and waits for the sun to come up.

\--- 

“Claudia.”

One word, three syllables, but from Leena (always so good at projecting herself, even when she’s not really saying anything of substance) it’s enough to give her away. She knows. It’s obvious, upsettingly so, and there’s something automatic, a reflexive kind of hyper-defensive aggression in the way that Claudia feels her jaw go tight in the half-second before she turns around.

“What?”

There’s a smile on Leena’s face, but it’s not one she usually wears. Claudia would know; the woman has one of the most infuriatingly dazzling smile’s she’s ever seen, and looking right at it is kind of like looking directly at the sun with its risk of damaged retinas and potential blindness. Lately, though, it’s not been so much like that. It’s been dim where it was once dazzling, a flicker where it used to be a flare, and it’s even more obvious now than it has been. The brightness is fading on a daily basis; Leena’s smile is getting pale and wan, just like the rest of them.

Still, though, she keeps it there, seemingly by sheer force of will. If Claudia wasn’t so annoyed, she’d be impressed.

“You’ve washed that same cup four times,” Leena tells her, and Claudia scowls. “You’re going to wear out the paint.”

“So what?” Claudia demands, struck down by her trademark need to over-compensate for shame with belligerence. “It’s a frackin’ _cup_ , Leena. No-one cares if it’s got a flower on it.”

“I care,” Leena says softly. “I like flowers.”

Then, of course, Claudia feels like she’s gotta be the most awful person in the history of awfulness, because the smile doesn’t disappear, but it gets kind of sad. And the thing about a sad smile is that, most of the time, it’s so much sadder than no smile at all. At least, it definitely looks that way on Leena, for whom brightness is just the way she is, and Claudia wishes she could still claim that the tightness in her chest was aggravation.

“Fine,” she mutters, because, as awful as she feels, empathy is still a skill that evades her; her body won’t let her show it, even when she wants to, all tightened up and twitching for a fight, whether her companion wants one or not, because that is the only way she knows to communicate when she’s in pain. “Fine. I’ll leave your stupid frackin’ flower cup alone. Okay? Jeez.”

Leena touches her arm, just below the edge of her sleeve, and it takes literally everything Claudia has not to lash out with her fists. “Hey. I think I need a break. How about you?”

It’s obviously a trap, but Claudia is using up so much of her strength on not being violent that there’s nothing left to use for resisting the bait. “Sure,” she hears herself blurt out before her smart brain can catch up and stop her. “I mean, uh. Y’know. Whatever.”

For about half a second, the sun-bright shimmer is almost back. “Great. C’mon.”

They play chess. Claudia’s good, but she’s also smart, and she can tell that Leena’s letting her win on purpose. She wants to ask why (does she really look so fragile that the damn woman thinks she’ll have a meltdown or something if she loses?), but, if she’s honest, it feels too good to just have something to celebrate – even if it is fake – and so she just runs with it and doesn’t say anything.

“You look tired,” Leena says, deliberately taking way too much time to judge her next move. It’s more bait, but it’s obvious bait this time, and Claudia is feeling strong enough now that she will not rise to it.

“Y’know,” she retorts, eyeing her stack of pwned pawns, “there’s some things a girl doesn’t ever want to hear, dude.”

“Sorry,” Leena chuckles, sounding exactly the opposite. “I’m just worried about you.”

“Don’t be. I can take care of myself.”

“I know you can,” Leena replies. There are shadows under her eyes; Claudia notices them for the first time when she meets her gaze, and she can’t help wondering if maybe Leena hasn’t been sleeping too well either. “But that doesn’t mean you have to. Sometimes we let people take care of us because we want to.”

“Yeah? Well, I don’t.”

Leena contemplates the board, and finally makes her move. It’s absurdly lame, and it leaves her king exposed. Any doubt that Claudia might’ve been entertaining is gone in a heartbeat: there’s no way in hell that she’s not doing this completely on purpose. Nobody in the universe is that stupid.

“Claudia...”

Something in her tone resonates, a high note hit too clean in a room full of chandeliers, and just like the glass, Claudia feels herself shatter.

“Stop it!” she yells. “Okay? Just stop it! You’re not—” Her voice cracks, and all the pain in her throat comes out, raw and hoarse, in every word. “You’re not Myka!”

Leena swallows hard; she looks like she’s just been punched in the face, and, for a second, Claudia almost feels guilty. “I’m not trying to be.”

“Then what?” Claudia demands. “What _are_ you trying to do?”

Her hands are trembling, fists balled white-knuckle tight on the table; Leena turns them over for her, and unclenches them with her trademark gentleness, one finger at a time. “I’m not trying to ‘do’ anything,” she says, the words scarcely audible.

There’s something in the way that she whispers, always so soft and so gentle; every time she does it, it breaks down even the most stubborn parts of Claudia’s resolve. She can feel the anger flickering now, sparking and crackling like a light-bulb that’s about to burn out, and she knows there’s not enough of it left to keep going. She can’t keep fighting like this, not when she doesn’t even really know what she’s fighting against in the first place. She knows it, and Leena knows it, and she hates the way she’s being played, but she can’t do anything about it.

So she just yells “Dammit, Leena!”, like that somehow says everything she’s feeling, and suddenly the empathy in those shadow-lined eyes is the opposite of looking into the sun. Suddenly, it’s like looking into a world without any sun at all, and Claudia finds that she hates that almost as much as she hates her own weakness; she hates that Leena’s eyes are so dark and heavy, hates that the sun has been taken out of them, hates most of all that she herself is too busy hurting to really care.

“It’s okay.”

Of course it’s not okay, but she’s still Leena, and she will always say that it is. Except this time, it’s not that it’s okay because anything is actually ‘okay’, it’s okay because it’s really not okay at all, and that just makes it so much worse.

And, naturally, she has to follow it up with “I miss her too...”, like that’s some kind of comfort, like Claudia wants to hear it, and there’s that high note again – that perfect pitch in her voice, resonance – and it breaks Claudia’s heart apart, like it’s made out of something so much more fragile than glass.

“Why’d she go?”

It’s as close to the guts of it as anyone is ever going to see in her, and Leena knows it, eyes bright and wet as she shakes her head.

“I don’t know, Claudia.”

The answer cuts deep, but it’s honest, and Claudia appreciates that.

Silently, stealthily, Leena threads her fingers through Claudia’s, keeping them from tightening back into fists, and maybe trying to ground her a little bit. Claudia glares, hating the weakness that the connection represents, the way that Leena can feel every tremor in her, the way that her hands won’t stop shaking. She hates herself for the way she’s feeling, hates Leena for seeing and feeling it in her, hates that she can’t stop it, hates the part of her that doesn’t want to. She hates everything about this.

Still, though, she doesn’t pull away.

She wants to, but she doesn’t. Because, for all that she hates it, for all that it hurts, for all the weakness she feels in herself, it’s not just her. And, if she’s weak and lame and pathetic for feeling the way she does, then maybe she’s not the only one. Because, for all her empathy, Leena’s hands are shaking too.

She hates it. Every part of it. But she doesn’t pull away, because it’s the closest to not-alone she’s felt since Myka left.

\--- 

She doesn’t sleep again that night, but she doesn’t cry so much either. At least, this time, it’s not loud enough that she needs to stifle it, and when she’s lying awake at four-oh-three and beyond, watching the ghosts of stars as they run away from the soon-rising sun, at least the pillow beneath her head is mostly dry.

She still thinks about Myka. Still longs to knock on her door and find her awake too, warm and comfortable with her books or the manual or her reports or her whatever. Still aches to curl up under the covers at the end of her bed, lulled by the night-light and the sound of softly-turned pages, soothing in so many ways that make so little sense. She still misses her.

But the pain is just a little bit less unbearable now than it was last night... and, when she does cry, it’s quietly.

It’s not exactly a victory, but it’s something. Progress, or a glimmer of hope. Something like Myka’s night-light, possibly. Hazy and dim and barely there at all, but just about enough to remind her in those bleak forever-hours that maybe, just maybe, the world won’t stay dark forever.

\--- 

The next day, she goes back to the Warehouse.

Or, more accurately, _they_ go back to the Warehouse, because Leena’s gotten ridiculously clingy (or possibly because she just doesn’t trust Claudia to drive just now, which is really freakin’ stupid, but whatever). At any rate, Claudia finds that she doesn’t completely hate the company, and Leena is pretty much the only one of them who doesn’t complain too much about her choice of tunes for the CD-changer.

(She does, however, kind of not-so-subtly point out that it’s not even a ten-minute drive, and is it really necessary to spend double that amount of time picking out a CD? Really?)

(Answer: _YES_.)

Claudia falters outside, almost tripping over her own feet as they come skidding to a halt of their own accord, needing a moment before going inside. Leena’s hand is surprisingly strong at her back, and Claudia finds the contact weirdly steadying. In a really annoying way, that is... not that she’d ever admit to the point anyway.

“Okay?”

Claudia sucks in a breath through her teeth, glares at her sneakers. “I’m fine.”

Leena nods lightly, but she doesn’t take her hand back. Claudia discovers that she doesn’t mind its being there quite as much as she probably should.

Artie’s pleased to see them. He’d never say the words, of course, but Claudia can tell. He looks drawn, harried, but there’s definitely something of the old Artie in him. Well, at least, there’s more of Artie in him than there is of Claudia in herself right now. And, sure, it’s kind of reassuring that at least one of them is almost kind of like themselves, a little bit... but, at the same time, Claudia can feel the anger start to swell up in her again, that dark red cloud that it would be so easy to lose herself in if she lets her guard down.

The thing is, as much as she knows it’s just the way it is, it kicks at the part of her that does still cry at night. How can he stand there and act like it’s just another day in Univille when Myka’s not there and HG’s evil and he’s still got that horrible thing on his arm? How can he make like everything’s normal when it so obviously isn’t?

“Claudia,” Leena soothes, too low for even Artie’s superhuman hearing to pick up, and Claudia realises that the muscles in her back must be rigid beneath her fingertips.

Without even thinking about what she’s doing, she reaches back and takes her hand.

The contact isn’t much, but the way Leena’s fingers wrap around hers, squeezing gently, is just enough to keep her temper in check as Artie raises an excessively bushy eyebrow at them, and huffs melodramatically.

“How good of you both to show up,” he mutters. “Are you here to actually do your jobs, or just admire how short-handed we are?”

It’s just Artie being Artie. She knows that, knows that he can’t say he’s happy to see her and so he’s saying the only thing he can say – work, work, work, because feelings scare him and sentimentality scares him even more. She knows it, because she knows him, but it still hits like a kick in the teeth. She reels for a second or two, bites her tongue, and grips Leena’s hand so hard that she actually hears her wince.

“Like you’d even let me pick up the slack if I offered, geezer.” The words sound easy, but they don’t come that way at all. “ _‘You’re too young! You’re too uneducated! You’re too impulsive! You’re too short!’_ ”

“You’re not much shorter than he is...” Leena points out, and they both glare at her.

“Whatever,” Claudia snaps, whirling back to Artie with an artificial scowl. “You got a light-bulb that needs replacing or something? Pretty sure even an ‘apprentice’ can manage that...”

“You’d think,” Artie remarks wryly. “And yet, I distinctly recall—”

“Oh my God, let it go!” She’s flushing hot, and it’s about equal parts anger and humiliation now. “Jeez, what is with you people? Just tell me what you need already.”

He shifts thoughtfully, and the sharp movement must have sent a jolt to his injured shoulder or something, because suddenly he’s yelping and flinching, clutching at the offending spot with his good hand, and Claudia can feel the colour draining from her face, every other emotion she’s got taking a sudden backseat to the sense of near-paralysing terror.

“What?! What is it?! Oh God, what—”

“Oh, calm down,” he grumbles, then scowls at Leena like he wants to say _‘can you put her on a leash, please?’_. “Don’t be so dramatic. I’m fine.”

“Oh yeah,” Claudia shoots back, still pale and shaky. “Yeah, you’re totally fine. Everything’s all fine, right? We’re all just totally—”

“Claudia,” Leena says again, and Claudia can’t help wondering when the sound of her name from this infuriating woman became enough to actually make her shut up. It shouldn’t be (if anything, it should make her all the more determined to make herself heard)... and yet, she can feel the warmth within her, all the way down to her fingertips where they’re tangled up in Leena’s and, for some dumbass, idiotic reason, it quiets her.

“Thank you, Leena,” Artie says, but he’s looking a little less Artie-like now.

Leena shrugs an ambivalent _‘you’re welcome’_ , then carries right on like the moment never existed at all, moving on in a way that neither Claudia nor Artie are quite able to do. Being Leena, and keeping them all afloat because they can’t take care of themselves.

“So,” she says thoughtfully, “what do you want us to do?”

\--- 

As it turns out? Inventory.

Because, yeah, that’s so totally the most important thing they could possibly be doing right now, what with Pete being out in the field all by himself, and no-one out there to watch his back. It’s not like he’s not just lost his best friend and his girlfriend all in the same day or anything. It’s not like he’s gonna be off his game or anything. It’s not like might freakin’ need some backup or anything. Right, Artie? Yeah. Right. ’Cause, yeah, there’s no way that Pete could possibly be super-vulnerable or anything right now, right?

Thinking about it makes her throat close up, and it’s not the anger that she expects, but the fear and the sadness she’s trying so hard to overwrite. She wishes she could be mad, could hate on Artie for not letting her have Pete’s back, but she can’t. There isn’t enough in her to feed the anger when she’s so freaking scared. She doesn’t know what she’ll do if Pete gets hurt too.

It’s the first time she wants to be out in the field for a reason that’s more than _‘because it’s awesome’_. She doesn’t care about chasing artefacts, or saving the world, or playing the big hero, or looking like a badass with a Tesla in one hand and her Farnsworth in the other. She doesn’t care about any of that crap any more, and it’s not because she’s grown up, but because she’s gotten younger. Because she’s devolved back into the little kid she once was, the small child who just wants to keep her big brother safe from the things that want him dead. Just like with Joshua, she wants to be out there with Pete, to watch his back and keep him safe from the things that want to hurt him.

Because he’s Pete, and he’s her bro, and he’s falling apart just like she is... and she really, really, really needs him to not die.

Only, yea. She’s stuck in here, and he’s out there, and there’s nothing she can do from where she is right now except put a stupid little check-mark on the list she’s working through, a little mark of positivity next to ‘Duke Ellington’s first piano’ (and, okay, so maybe if she was in a better mood she’d’ve taken a moment or two to comment on how freakin’ awesome that is, but she’s not, and so she really doesn’t care), and it _sucks_. It sucks that this is all she can do, that it’s all Artie will let her do, that it’s all she’s good enough to do.

Deep down inside, in the corner of her mind that can vaguely remember what it is to be rational, she knows she would be a liability, more of a hindrance than a help. She knows that she’s not ready (and part of her is still too scared to even try, still too broken down by her own heartbreak to want to face the world like Pete has to, to step out and live in it again). But still, she aches with it all. And, like it always does when the world threatens the things she loves, her blood burns hot with the need to help, to take action, to _do something_ instead of feeling helpless.

She saved his life once, didn’t she? While everyone else was dealing with the whole world-in-peril thing... while Myka was watching the product of her bad decisions flash before her eyes like a grainy old black-and-white movie, while Artie was shooting himself in the shoulder and almost dying, while HG was deciding that it would be cooler to just nuke the world than try and deal with it (and right now, God help her, Claudia kind of maybe understands that impulse a whole lot more than she wants to)... while they were all out there turning everything upside-down, she was the one still here, saving Pete’s life.

So why can’t she do it again? Why does she gotta be stuck in the Warehouse taking inventory when she should be out there in the field with Pete, keeping him safe?

The world has taken too much from her. It took her parents. It took her brother. It came so close, _so damn close_ , to taking her sanity too. And then, for like five minutes, it gave her everything back – her brother, her mind, and a family like she couldn’t even imagine in her wildest dreams. It made her think that maybe it was fair, or at least tried to be, even when it failed... only now it’s starting to take it all away again, and, just like when she was a kid, she’s not allowed to do anything but watch from a scared, sheltered distance as it happens.

She’s lost a role model in HG, someone she thought she could look up to. Someone who was a little bit dark, a little bit unhinged... someone who was a little bit disturbed, just like her, but also a whole lot brilliant. And she’d really thought that she _got_ her. She’d really, really been dumb enough to believe that they might’ve had a connection. Not the kind of connection that HG had with Myka, of course – not even Claudia was that oblivious, or that optimistic – but something. Something that was just theirs, a shared brilliance and a shared darkness to shine it into. She’d really believed that.

Only, as it turned out, HG’s darkness was darker than her brilliance was bright. And now Claudia has no-one to make her believe that she’s not doomed to turn out exactly the same way.

Because she’s lost Myka, too. Myka, her big sister, a different kind of role model, the kind of person she’d never imagined she might ever be cool enough to hang with. Myka, the kind of action-heroine she’s always wanted to be like. Myka, who was always so much more epic than any Kara Zor-El or Buffy Summers or Xena, or anyone else in the whole damn world, real or otherwise. Myka, who, even with all her epicness, still took the time to look at Claudia sometimes and have faith in her. Myka, who would let her stay on her bed when she couldn’t sleep without ever making a big thing out of it. Myka, who never really _got_ her, but who cared about her just the same. And Claudia’s always kinda let herself secretly think that maybe one day she’d be able to repay her for all that faith, that one day she’d be able to make her proud.

...only Myka’s gone now, too, and whatever Claudia becomes, she won’t be there to see it.

Her soul aches. She can’t think about this. Can’t think about how they’ve lost HG, how they’ve lost Myka, how they almost lost Artie. She can’t think about how they would’ve lost Pete, as well, if she’d screwed up her part in that little drama. She can’t think about any of that, because if she does, she’ll fall into the abyss, drown in the darkness. And if she falls – if she really does go there – she’s not sure she has enough left in her to pull herself back out.

So she has to channel what she’s feeling, to redirect its flow into something less dangerous. The anger, the hurt, the grief, the pain. She has to reshape it all, turn it into something it’s not, forge the dark iron into a weapon of justice instead of destruction. She has to make herself think about Pete now, about keeping him safe when he’s out there in the field, because the alternative is thinking of all the things she’d do to anyone who’d hurt him, the things she’d do to anyone who would threaten _any_ of the few scattered fragments of happiness she has left. And that way lies madness.

So, yeah. She has to stop it happening at all, because she’s not sure that she can cope if she doesn’t. She can’t even think about it, even hypothetically, without feeling the anger twist up like a forge-heated blade, sharp and keen in her chest, without seeing the abyss staring up at her, its bottomless teeth all sharp and gleaming. She doesn’t trust herself to survive if she loses anyone else.

If she lets herself think about it, lets herself go to that place, she is so sure that she’ll turn into HG.

The problem is, this time, Myka won’t be there to stop her.

And Claudia is so, so scared of that.

\--- 

Pete gets back from his latest mission the next day, all in one piece, without so much as a scratch on him. Claudia asks what the hell took him so long, and makes a point of not letting him see just how relieved she is.

By mid-afternoon, because it’s his thing, he’s sprawled out on the couch in his room with a box of Oreos and a marathon of crappy old-school horror movies.

Claudia socks him on the arm, tells him he should’ve called more often, and then, without being invited, drops down next to him. He’s about to start _The Blob_ , and so she steals a handful of his cookies and gushes exaggeratedly about how awesome Steve McQueen is, in the juvenile hope that he’ll let her stay.

He tousles her hair and laughs airily. “Shouldn’t you be more into, I dunno, Zac Efron or something?”

“Shut up!” she cries, like it’s the most offensive thing she’s ever heard in her entire life. And, well, it’s not quite that bad – it’s not like he said Nicolas Cage, after all – but it’s probably up there in the top ten.

(Well, top fifteen. Maybe.)

He giggles like a child at how affronted she gets, and flips another cookie at her. She catches it effortlessly, and lets her head fall down onto his shoulder.

Neither of them talk about the way he lets his arm drape across her, pulling her in close, playing the protective big brother, and they definitely don’t talk about the way she leans against him, tiny and fierce, legs curled underneath her and elbows at uncomfortable angles so she can jump up quickly if she needs to. They’re both trying to take care of each other, in their own way, or at least look out for each other. There’s him trying to shield her from the big bad world that they both know is out there waiting to swallow her, and she with her bared teeth making it clear to anyone who comes close that she will beat them down before she lets them touch him.

Obviously, they don’t talk about it. What would they even say? _‘Stop being an idiot’_ , probably, and Claudia doesn’t want to hear that right now. She knows she’s stupid; she doesn’t want to hear it said out loud.

So they just watch the movie, not exactly in silence, but definitely not saying anything of substance. Claudia talks about Steve McQueen, and Pete waxes lyrical about his love for old-school B movies, and it’s so close to awesome, except the couch is way too big for just the two of them, and there’s a Myka-shaped imprint on the other side. And they try, they try so hard... but...

“Lemme come with you,” she blurts out, just as Steve’s about to save the day.

“Huh?” he mumbles.

He’s not taking his eyes off the screen, and she knows it’s not because he’s so immersed in this movie he’s seen a hundred times, but because he can’t bring himself to look at her.

“Lemme come with you,” she says again. “Out in the field. Lemme have your back, bro.”

The sound he makes is trying so hard to be a chuckle, but it comes off more like a grimace. “Claud,” he sighs. “You know I’d love to have you out there. But it’s not my call, and we both know the big guy won’t let you.” She pouts, and he thwacks her lightly upside the head. “Don’t give me that look. You know it’s true.”

“You can talk to him,” she whines. “Dude, you know he’ll listen to you if you just...”

She trails off for a second or two, because she’s still not exactly sure. For all that she desperately wants to help, she’s still so scared of screwing up, of trying so hard to keep him from getting hurt that she accidentally causes it to happen... and it’s something of a toss-up right now, which of the two emotions is at the front of her brain.

“Can’t hurt to ask, right?” she says in the end, and instantly feels shaky with anxiety.

He groans, exaggeratedly beleaguered, but the hollowness in his eyes tells her that his mind is someplace else. Probably at the other end of the couch with the Myka-shaped holes in their lives.

“You’re such a kid,” he says, and it’s evasive but genuinely light. “You want me to ask him if you can have ice-cream for breakfast, too?”

“Nah,” she answers immediately. “You’d just eat it all yourself.”

It’s a fair point, and he grunts his acknowledgement. She doesn’t press the issue after that, though, and he doesn’t say anything either. They just watch the rest of the movie, right through to the point where the TV gets pissed and fades out into static snow. She can feel the sharp pressure of his chin where he’s laid his head down on top of hers, and she wants so badly to hug him right now, to tell him all the things she’s been thinking – _‘I’ll keep you safe, I’ll have your back, I won’t let them hurt you too...’_ – but she doesn’t want to move.

“Thanks for saving my ass,” he says, completely out of the blue.

She doesn’t have to ask what he’s talking about, and she already knows the only possible way she can respond; her chest aches to make this into something important, but she has to play it like the game it needs to be, shaping the words into something pointless because it’s the only way that either of them can deal with this.

“Yeah, well. Don’t make a habit out of it, loser.”

“I won’t,” he promises with a cocksure grin.

The words ring hollow, but she lets them stick to her just the same, futile but well-intentioned, comfortingly uncomfortable, like the band-aids still clinging to her fingers.

\--- 

The next day, he’s gone again.

His bedroom door is wide open; the room’s empty, and there are clothes tossed around all over the bed. It’s a typical scene in the world of Pete when he’s had to pack and leave in a hurry, partly because he knows that Leena will have his room perfectly tidy and everything back in its proper place by the time he gets back, but mostly because he wouldn’t really care if she didn’t. And also (Claudia likes to think) as a kind of unspoken shout-out to her, so that she can tell at a glance where he is, and know that he’s not just died or disappeared in the night.

She’s not happy about it, though. It’s getting worse, this irrational fear that she has, the unfounded certainty every time he goes away, even for just a few hours, that something awful will happen and then she’ll lose him too.

Leena’s making breakfast when she stalks down the stairs, and just the thought of it makes Claudia’s stomach go sour. She doesn’t need to see the look on Leena’s face to know that, just like every morning this week, she will try to insist that Claudia eat something ( _“even just an apple or some toast or something – for heaven’s sake, Claudia, you have to eat!”_ ), and her body’s already preparing itself for the same circular argument they’ve had every day since the world turned into a horrible terrible no-good place.

“Not hungry,” she calls into the kitchen, hoping to pre-empt it, and speeds up her pace in a feint at escape.

Of course, it’s fruitless. It’s always fruitless. “Not so fast...”

Nobody, Claudia decides huffily, should be allowed to sound that enthusiastic before 10am.

“I’m serious, dude,” she whines, hoping the misery in her tone will weaken Leena’s resolve this morning. “I don’t want—”

“Claudia.” There’s a sudden tension in Leena’s tone as she interrupts, like she knows she’s about to broach something that will make Claudia mad, but cannot in good conscience let herself walk away without trying. “You can’t keep doing this. Myka wouldn’t want you to starve yourself.”

And there it is. And, of course, Claudia snaps.

“Yeah, well, guess what, Leena? You’re not Myka. So you don’t get to say what she’d want. So just... just back off, okay? Back off and leave me alone.”

Leena actually flinches at that. At least, as much as Leena ever flinches at anything, which doesn’t really count in terms of normal-person flinching. It’s another one of those awful moments when her face doesn’t really change very much at all, but it suddenly gets very sad, and Claudia is left feeling like a complete and utter jackass for making that happen.

“Claudia,” she says again, ever so gently, and Claudia really can’t deal with this right now; already, the rage is starting to fizzle, and she hates that so much.

“Leena,” she counters, and her voice is so weak. “Don’t. Okay? Not today. Not...” She doesn’t mention Pete, but she’s pretty sure she doesn’t have to. “Just _don’t_.”

She watches sadly as Leena debates whether or not to push her; it’s a long and painful moment, but it ends the right way, and Leena breathes a heavy sigh as she finally backs down.

“All right,” she said; the moment is definitely over now, Claudia can tell, because she’s all super-composed again. “Would you like some coffee, at least?”

It’s not exactly a complicated question (when is the answer to _‘do you want coffee?’_ ever anything other than a resounding _‘hell to the yeah’_?), but for some reason, it hits Claudia in exactly the wrong place at exactly the wrong time, and she suddenly realises that she’s actually kind of freaking the hell out because she _doesn’t know_. It’s the simplest question in the world, but she doesn’t know if she wants coffee or not, and it scares the life out of her.

She’s clearly doing a sucky job of keeping the rising panic in check, though, because suddenly Leena’s right there, all up in her face, like she knows she’s on the brink of a coffee-related meltdown. She doesn’t even wait for an answer to the question, just wordlessly presses that stupid flower-painted cup into Claudia’s hands and smiles that sun-bright smile.

Her hands linger, pressing down lightly on the backs of Claudia’s knuckles. It’s just for a heartbeat or two longer than is really necessary (Claudia probably wouldn’t have even noticed it at all if she wasn’t so completely on edge), and then she’s stepping back. And it’s a little bit ridiculous and a little bit lame, but Claudia finds that she actually kind of misses the pressure, the understated contact, when it’s taken away. Because – and it’s _really_ ridiculous, and _really_ lame, and she knows it, but that doesn’t change anything – there’s a sweetness there, a gentleness in those fleeting little touches, a tenderness in Leena’s fingertips that bleeds out and into her. It’s the feeling of something like a promise, only this one doesn’t have words and so it can’t be broken.

Lately, it seems like moments like this are about the only thing in the world – the only freakin’ thing in the stripped-down, laid-bare hellhole the world has become – that’s keeping her from losing it.

“Leena,” she says, and all the bulked-up aggression is gone from her voice like it was never there, like she’s not as weak as she actually is, like she’s not the one who made Leena do that sad little almost-flinching thing she did, like they’re _friends_. Which maybe they are, kind of, but it hasn’t felt like that for a while, and the sentiment strikes a chord right across her heartstrings.

She wants to say something else, to follow it up with smart words (or even any words at all, anything to lighten the gravity of what she’s feeling) but she doesn’t know what her mind is doing any more, and it won’t talk to her throat.

Not that it matters anyway, what she wants to say and what she can’t, because Leena’s already turning back to the simmering stove, labouring over her precious breakfast like she really believes anyone will ever eat it.

“Drink your coffee, Claudia,” she says quietly.

Claudia doesn’t. But she holds the cup tight against her chest, pressed into the cavity where her heart’s meant to be, until they both get cold.

\--- 

Pete doesn’t get back that night.

It’s not unheard-of (hell, when he’s out hunting artefacts, it’s not even particularly unusual at all), but Claudia has a really tough time remembering that when it’s getting dark outside and he hasn’t called or texted or emailed or... or... or freakin’ _anything_ , dude, and she’s scared and lonely and frustrated, and all she wants in the whole wide world is just to know that he’s okay.

She doesn’t make it to four-oh-three.

Like always, her mind won’t shut up, only this time it’s reeling off all the hundred thousand million things that might have happened, all the zillion reasons why Pete might not have made it home, why he might never come home again. Maybe he’s lying in a gutter somewhere, hurt or artefacted or worse, only no-one knows about it because no-one is there to have his back. Or maybe he’s had enough of the Warehouse without Myka in it, and he’s run away and left too. Or maybe...

...or maybe he’s already dead.

She doesn’t cry. She’s too freaked out to even muster the juxtapositional solace that would come with letting herself shed the tears. She just lies there, hiding under the bedcovers and trembling, for what feels like a lifetime, until she can’t breathe, until she can’t think, until there’s nothing but the fear and the frustration, until she knows the emotions will break her apart if she doesn’t do something.

It’s not even two in the morning when she cracks. She’s never felt so alone in all her life, and she wants Myka so badly that it actually physically hurts. There’s a kick-drum in her chest, slamming against her ribs in a tempest of passion and power that, if it only had a rhythm to speak of, maybe wouldn’t be so bad. But it doesn’t, it’s just noise, and she can’t endure it. It hurts too much.

So, because she’s scared and lonely and frustrated, because she’s weak and pathetic and alone, she does the only thing she can, the one thing that her heart has been crying out for through night after night of fear-darkened loneliness and salt-soaked pain.

She sneaks into Myka’s room (empty and cold and abandoned, just like she is), and crawls underneath the covers.

\--- 

Morning is just about to happen when Leena finds her, pulling back the covers and letting the deep orange glow of sunrise bounce off the darkness in her eyes.

“Claudia.”

“Leena.”

The name isn’t soft and cautious like her own sounds when it’s on Leena’s lips. Coming from Claudia, the name is practically a challenge. In fact, it is a challenge; she’s flat-out daring her to criticise this, to pass judgement on her for doing this just like she always does on everything she does, with or without words. It’s a gauntlet thrown down, and it’s actually kind of disappointing when Leena doesn’t pick it up.

She doesn’t say anything at all, in fact. Just stands there, twisting the corner of the covers in one hand and scrubbing the back of her neck with the other, and looks at her. Like she’s waiting for something.

Claudia doesn’t want to give her anything, though; she doesn’t want to throw up any more reasons for Leena to think that she’s weak, doesn’t want her to see any more of her scarred soul, her broken spirit, than she already has. She wants to keep her mouth shut, to yank the covers back with violence and brutality, pull them back over her head, and block out the shadow standing over her and the hot orange sun beaming through from the window behind.

The light cuts through Leena’s hair, though, and it throws itself into Claudia’s eyes despite her best efforts to hide from it, and she’s so blinded that her guard falters and she can’t find purchase with her flailing hands. It’s like she’s lost at sea, but the stars are too bright, blinding her so that she can’t use them to guide her home.

She says it again, “Leena...”, only this time it’s not a challenge, it’s a plea, and she hates that Leena hears it, hates the way that she always _knows_.

And then, without warning, she’s up on her feet. She has no idea how she got there, only that it sure as hell wasn’t under her own power. Her arms are tense and taut, cold under Leena’s warm palms, but the anger that she so desperately wants to feel simply isn’t there. She aches to be filled up with rage, to gorge herself sick on righteous indignation and fury, to yell and scream and howl, to burn the world down until there’s nothing left of it, until it hurts like she hurts, but she can’t. With Leena’s hands on her, she can’t feel anything at all except the grief and the loss, the overwhelming pain and loneliness, all the weakness she’s tried so hard to fight.

“Claudia.”

It’s an invitation. And, heaven help her, Claudia is too weak not to take it.

Leena pulls her in, and her palms aren’t the only part of her that’s warm. In a heartbeat, maybe even less, Claudia is lost. Lost to the thrall of deceptively powerful arms as they wrap around her, the calming caress of gentle hands against her back, the press of a soft cheek against her brow. Most of all, to the way that they’re both shaking, the way that Claudia isn’t the only one who’s drowning right now, the way that Leena, so much more than anyone else she’s ever known, takes her own comfort by giving what she has to others. She lets herself be weak in being so strong, and it makes Claudia feel stronger too.

And maybe it’s because she feels that way, stronger in Leena’s arms than out of them, connected for the first time to someone who feels what she feels, who’s trembling in all the same places as she is, who isn’t just easing her pain but sharing it, their souls touching so much more deeply than their bodies, even in such an embrace... maybe it’s because of all that that she feels herself slipping, that she feels the momentary slide from silent solace into speech, into words, into a plea that’s really a confession.

“Don’t go away...” she hears herself beg, and the words are so raw she almost thinks they can’t have come from inside her. “Don’t you leave me too.”

“I won’t,” Leena promises in a whisper; her voice is thick even as her lips are feather-light against Claudia’s temple. “I’m not going anywhere.”

And Claudia believes her. She believes her because she knows that it’s true. Because she’s Leena, and Leena is the one person – the only one out of all of them – who really and truly and genuinely won’t leave. She’s the one person, _the only one_ , who will never go anywhere, whose only place in the world is the one she’s in right now. Claudia can let herself feel safe in her arms, and her heart can let out all of its pain and fear under her warm palms. She can place herself – heart and body and soul – into her protection, and know that she won’t ever be let down. Artie can get shot, and HG can get evil, and Myka can get gone, and Pete can get hurt or artefacted or worse or dead... but Leena is here, and it’s the only place she’ll ever be.

She is the only constant left, and Claudia clings to her like she is the most precious thing in the world.

...and, really, in this moment, she is.

\--- 


	2. The Truth That Lies

\--- 

The thing is, Claudia kind of sucks at the whole ‘not being totally fine and cool and awesome with life, the universe, and everything’ deal. In fact, she kind of _really_ sucks at it. Like, a whole freaking lot, actually, and she kind of understands (not that she’ll ever admit it in a place where anyone could hear it) that, approximately 87% of the time, this probably makes her a pretty sucky person. 

Her reflex reaction to pain is to lash out, and her reflex reaction to fear is to fight as hard as she can. She really isn’t good at dealing with situations where she has to accept – out loud, even, and in front of other human-type people – that she’s (maybe kinda sorta possibly) not exactly coping.

It’s comforting and annoying in equal measure, how completely Leena seems to get that.

She knows, without either of them having to say anything, exactly what Claudia’s going to do, exactly how she feels, exactly what she needs. She knows when not to talk to her (which is probably a good thing because, right now, that pretty much translates as _‘all the time’_ ), and, rather more important than that, she knows when to not even be in the same room as her. Claudia can be really, really difficult to be around, and sometimes the most helpful thing in the world that anyone can do is just not be around her at all. And for all of her annoyingness, Leena seems to be the only person in the universe who genuinely gets that.

Which, yeah, she does. She really and truly does. And, once it starts, this weird little not-sharing thing that they have going on, she doesn’t try to push Claudia at all. As soon as she’s sure that Claudia will come to her if she needs to, she doesn’t even bother to make the point out loud at all, much less actively try to force it on her. She just steps back, like she’s so good at doing, stands there all quiet and gentle and _Leena_ , and lets stuff happen at its own pace.

And the stupid thing – the really crazy stupid ridiculous thing – is that it actually kind of works. It really does, because Claudia discovers that, despite every fighting instinct she has, in spite of every impulse in her to be stubborn and angry and unjustly aggressive to anyone within a ten-mile radius, to refuse by sheer force of will to seek out anything that could possibly be called ‘comfort... regardless of all the self-destruction that makes her who she is, she finds that she actually _does_ go to her.

It happens mostly at night. She’s still not sleeping, and she’s reached that point of delirious insomnia where the sleeplessness is almost enough in itself to make her cry for how exhausted she is, and that’s not even counting how much worse everything else in the world gets (even when she’s not too tired to even think) when it’s dark and she’s all alone and Myka isn’t there to make her forget about all the things inside her. The world at night right now is darker than it’s ever been; Claudia is so sad and so scared and so damn exhausted, and there’s no Myka for her to hang out with.

So, okay. yeah. Inevitably, it happens – she starts to hang out with Leena instead. And it’s not because she’s ‘there’ in some lame sentimental Hallmark Greeting Card kind of way, it’s because she’s actually physically there. She’s right there, in the same space as Claudia at the same time, in the B&B at night, even when Pete is out on his missions and Artie is sleeping or sulking in the Warehouse. When Myka is gone and HG is locked up and everyone else is someplace else, Leena is there, eight where she always is.

She’s _there_. And she’s the only one who is.

\--- 

The first time it happens, neither of them say anything at all.

It’s a little past three in the morning, and Claudia doesn’t even bother to knock. She’s not usually so forward, so presumptuously rude (at least, not when she’s about to invade someone’s bedroom in the middle of the night), but something in her is pretty sure that Leena, more than anyone else in the world, won’t mind.

And, of course, she doesn’t. She doesn’t mind at all. She’s awake too, wide eyes bright but haunted in the near-lightless room, and she looks up at Claudia in a way that says everything without ever saying anything.

She scoots silently over, making room, and pats the space next to her. Without even thinking about it, Claudia crawls into the bed and curls up, not at the end of the bed like with Myka, but right next to her.

The warm presence of another body is as potent as anything she’s ever felt. She’s not accustomed to real physical contact, not in bed, but Leena doesn’t react at all; she acts like it’s the most normal and natural thing in the world, to have another person in her bed with her, like it’s nothing to even blink at, much less care about, and her calmness washes over Claudia too.

What really does hit her, though, is the way that (even though there’s no conceivable way that she can know what the gesture means to Claudia) Leena intuitively reaches across to switch on the night-light.

Claudia bites her lips, and thinks of Myka. She thinks about how different it was with her, how the light would hit the wall in different patterns, how her bed wasn’t nearly so soft as this, how she’d lie down at the end of the bed. She lets herself remember the turning of pages, the restless shuffling as they both tried to get comfortable, the thoughtful noises that Myka would make when she read something especially interesting. It’s vivid and visceral, and if this was anyone but Leena being so kind to her, Claudia would feel bad for feeling so bad.

But, of course, it is Leena... and, with her, even feeling bad doesn’t feel quite so awful.

It’s not something that she can fight, anyway, even if she wanted to. The memory is too sharp, and it’s all the more profound for the fact that she’s _here_. Here, in someone else’s bed, taking her nocturnal comforts in another human being for the first time since Myka left, and for a moment or two, it feels kind of like a betrayal. Like, by accepting Leena in her place, she’s accepting that Myka is really gone, that she’s not coming back.

The thought strikes deep, rends her grief with guilt, and she chokes on it.

This time, though, when the tears come, they’re lost to the curve of Leena’s shoulder long before they can stain the pillows.

\--- 

In the morning, when Leena’s back in the kitchen, acting like nothing happened at all and glaring at her over yet another half-made breakfast (that nobody wants or will eat or even asked for), Claudia makes a point of actually trying to eat something.

She’s not really successful, everything too unappetising and her stomach too queasy with the lack of sleep and the excess of tears... but, failed as it inevitably is, she knows that it won’t be missed, and so makes the effort just the same.

Leena doesn’t say a word, but her smile lights up the whole room.

\--- 

A couple of days later, Pete gets back from his latest mission.

He’s wielding a flintlock pistol that supposedly belonged to some famous historical explorer or another – Walter Raleigh or Captain Cook or one of those other old dudes that Claudia really doesn’t care about (and, hell no, she’s not going to waste her time paying attention while Artie lectures her about it) – and a box of stupidly expensive chocolates.

(Claudia is about 85% sure that the pistol is the artefact and the chocolates are supposed to be a souvenir... but it’s really kind of hard to tell sometimes.)

As she sets to work shelving the pistol and making sure that the catalogue is all up-to-date, she realises that it’s been nearly four days since she been able to spend any amount of time with Pete. She’s missed him, kind of, but mostly she’s just been worried about him. Like, really, properly, heart-stopping _worry_ , the kind that he clearly doesn’t understand or he would’ve stopped whatever the hell he was doing just to let her know that he was still alive.

She’s still mad at him for that, for not calling or texting or emailing or anything, and the stubborn teenager in her doesn’t care that there’s about six hundred reasons why he might not have been able to. He could have spared eight seconds, for the love of whatever. That’s not so much to ask for, is it? They’re supposed to be buddies. Dammit, he’s supposed to be her big bro! After everything that’s gone down, everything they’ve all been through, how the hell can he not stop to think that she’ll be freaking out for every nanosecond she doesn’t hear from him?

So, yeah, she’s mad at him for that. And, honestly, she kind of feels a little justified in feeling that way, even if the teeny tiny little corner of her brain that’s almost mature tells her she should know better than to hold that kind of grudge. She’s young and angry and petulant, and so she makes a calculated point of spitefully ignoring his chocolate-shaped peace offering (even though they look really, really good) as a mark of spirited defiance.

Leena, cold-hearted harlot that she is, has no such prideful qualms, and she takes an obscene amount of enjoyment from telling Claudia – very loudly – how delightfully good the chocolates are, and how she really ought to try one.

Claudia retaliates, of course, by hogging all of the covers that night, and remarking – very loudly – on how _delightfully warm_ they are.

\--- 

Out of the blue, Artie irritably tells her that, if it’ll stop her sulking for five minutes, he’ll let her tag along on Pete’s next mission.

At first, she assumes that Pete must have made good on their little discussion, and talked to him about it. She’s pretty psyched, to be honest, and it’s the closest thing to real honest enthusiasm she’s felt since everything happened... at least, in the two minutes before she catches up with him and sees how miserable he looks about the whole thing.

“Dude,” she says, suddenly kind of hurt by the way he doesn’t look even slightly cheerful, much less as thrilled as she is. “What gives?”

He doesn’t look at her, so much as sort of through her, like there’s something behind her that’s so much more important than she is, and the way that he refuses to even try to meet her gaze is almost more unkind than the look of not-at-all-cool-with-this-ness on his face.

“Nothin’,” he says flatly, and she is so totally not buying that for a nanosecond. “Nothing gives. Go get packed, runt.”

She does, but the excitement is long gone now, and she makes as much noise as she possibly can while doing it, just so he knows beyond all doubt that he’s pissed her off.

It doesn’t exactly work; Pete, being Pete, is oblivious, but it does bring Leena running, and when she storms in (without even knocking), she’s got her hands already on her hips, and a trademark “I really wish you’d stop decimating my B&B, Claudia...” on her lips.

Because they don’t exactly talk about this stuff (and also because she’s maybe a little bit irritated by the obnoxious schoolteacher glare she’s getting just for making a little noise), Claudia makes a point of not telling her that she’s going to miss her. In fact, she doesn’t even use the word ‘goodbye’ at all.

What she does do, though, is hug her really tightly, and refuses to let go for about three full minutes.

If the look on Leena’s face when Claudia finally lets her pull away is anything to go by, she gets the message just as clearly as if she’d spelled it right out.

\--- 

It’s only when they’re actually in the car, tearing down the freeway, and he’s talking her through the mission, that Claudia figures out exactly why Pete’s so upset.

She also figures out a lot of other stuff, too. Like why Artie was so quick to let her go out into the field all of a sudden, and why he made a point of not telling her what the mission actually was ( _“Pete can do it,”_ he’d said instead, even though he knows even better than she does that Pete is the worst person in the history of the known universe to give anyone any kind of information about anything). Like why he looked so pissed when he told her she could go. She’d just put it down to him being his usual cranky self, automatically predisposed to frown on anything she might deem fun... but, of course, now she knows better. Like always, now that it’s too late, she knows everything.

It’s because the artefact that they’re after is, in fact, _The War Of The Worlds_.

Not HG’s book, of course. Claudia’s pretty sure they already have that one lying around the Warehouse somewhere. No, the thing that they’re after is a recording of Orson Welles’s 1938 radio broadcast – that lame Halloween prank (according to Pete’s rambling explanation) that caused mass panic or whatever. It’s a Welles artefact, not a _Wells_ artefact... but the connection is right there, and it is inescapable.

When Pete tells her about it, doing his job even as it visibly hurts him to even think (much less talk) about it, he’s gripping the steering wheel so tight that his knuckles turn white. Claudia, empathising way more than she wants to, bites her lip until it bleeds. She feels a bit sick; her stomach is lurching in a way that has absolutely nothing to do with the way that Pete is making the car swerve like a drunk sailor. Her chest is tight and painful too, like her body is trying really hard to panic but is feeling so many other things already that it doesn’t have enough room.

“Pete,” she says, strangled, but she doesn’t know what she’s supposed to say next.

“Don’t,” he snaps, and it’s one of those frightening, rare moments where he’s really and genuinely angry. She can tell that the anger isn’t really directed at her – she’s just a convenient target, and she’s thrown herself in the firing line – but that doesn’t make it any less unpleasant. “I don’t wanna hear it, Claud. Just keep your mouth shut and stay the hell out of trouble. We got enough to worry about with this stupid thing already. I don’t want to have to take care of you out there too.”

It’s harsh. Really harsh. It’s almost kind of cruel, actually, but Claudia doesn’t have enough left in her to be offended by it. She just mumbles “...dude”, real quiet, and stares unhappily out of the window for the half-hour or so that it takes for Pete’s brain to catch up with his mouth and realise how far over the line he’s stepped.

When it does, he sighs. She can feel the regret radiating from him in waves. “I’m sorry, Claud,” he says, and, even if she didn’t know him as well as she does, she could tell that he really does mean it. “That came out kind of wrong.”

“You bet your ass it did,” she quips. She’s shooting for snarky, but it doesn’t come out that way, all rough edges and aggression, so she gives it up in deference to forced ambivalence; better, she figures, to sound like she doesn’t care at all than to sound half as angry as she actually is. “Whatever, dude. It’s cool.”

“It’s not ‘cool’, Claud,” he says, and she’s not sure whether he’s more annoyed with her for taking it, or with himself for putting her in the position where she might feel like she has to. “You don’t gotta put up with that, okay? Not from me, and not from anyone else either. Just because you’re a little punk doesn’t mean you gotta sit there and take it when people talk down at you.” He forces a smile, but it’s not comforting. “So next time, you gotta shut me down. Kick me in the ’nads or somethin’, okay?”

“Eww,” she grimaces. Then, because at least he’s trying and she knows that she should probably do the same (if only for the sake of bro-ness), she adds, “Sure, dude. Whatever.”

He cups her shoulder for a second, then grips the wheel again, eyes dutifully back on the road. “Atta girl, Claud,” he says. “We’ll make a man outta you, yet.”

Claudia winces. That’s really not a mental image she wants to get stuck in her head. Still, though, she mumbles a (mostly honest) “thanks”, because at least he’s making the effort.

It’s more than Myka’s probably doing right now, she thinks, and immediately hates herself.

\--- 

It’s getting dusky by the time they get to where they’re supposed to be, so Pete checks them into a run-down roadside motel-slash-diner-slash-whatever (it’s not the B&B, so Claudia really doesn’t care what the hell it calls itself, and she tries to ignore the wistful angst that pulses in her chest when she thinks about it). He buys her dinner, but neither of them eat anything, and they don’t really talk very much either. Everything feels awkward, uncomfortable; they’re obviously both thinking about the same stuff, but neither of them has the guts to actually broach the subject out loud. It’s the story of both their lives.

As she pushes away her untouched plate with a weary sigh, Claudia finds that she kind of misses having Leena around to try and glare her into eating. Pete doesn’t seem to care... or, if he does, he doesn’t want to let it get in the way of their friendship, so he keeps his mouth shut and doesn’t say anything until they’re way past finished. It’s kind of painful, the way he obviously has no idea how much the silence is killing her.

“Get some sleep, Claud,” he instructs her, when they reach her room; it’s the first thing he’s said in about an hour. She can tell from the look on his face that he knows perfectly well that she won’t get any sleep at all, but he’s trying to be a responsible grown-up just as hard she is, so he says it just the same, because it’s the sort of thing that responsible grown-ups (supposedly) do.

“Sure,” she replies, trying not to let him see how miserable and lonely she’s really feeling. “See you in the morning.”

The room is ridiculously small. She thinks briefly about raiding the mini-bar (if she can find it, or if one even exists in a place this craptastic), and drinking all of the tiny little bottles of liquor that she knows they hide in those things, one by one... but she’s pretty sure, even if she did, they wouldn’t have much effect. She’s not exactly experienced when it comes to this stuff, by her own admission (most of the time, if she’s honest, the thought of willingly losing control like that is actually kind of scary), and she knows well enough that it would take a whole lot less for her to get drunk than it would for anyone else... but there’s only so much liquor you can fit into a bottle the size of your thumb.

And, anyway, she doesn’t want to just get a little bit buzzed in a crappy motel room in the middle of Nowhereville, Wisconsin; if she was going to drink, she’d _drink_. She’d do it hard and fast and properly, in a place with attitude, someplace big and loud and riotous, all screaming music and screaming people, the kind of lights that come with epilepsy warnings and the kind of liquor that would probably blow her brains right out if she tried to drain it down.

The idea is so tempting, so seductive, that it actually freaks her out a little bit, how bad she wants it.

She doesn’t give in to the impulse, though, and not just because of the eight billion reasons why she wouldn’t be able to even if she tried. She’s supposed to be an agent now, or at least a substitute sort-of apprentice not-quite-agent kind of thing. She’s here to keep Pete safe, to have his back, just like she wanted to. She’s here to make good on her promise, dammit, not to feed her own self-destructive urges.

But still, she’s restless and sad, and there’s no Leena here now to distract her from how much she misses Myka or how much she really doesn’t want to think about HG and her not-at-all fictional War of the World. There’s Pete, of course, just across the hall, but he’s an even bigger kid than she is, and he’s going through his own stuff anyway. Besides, he already said he’s not going to ‘take care of her’ or whatever, and so she has no intention of imposing her qualms or her presence on him. It would be a bridge too far, letting him see how weak she is when he’s expressly told her not to be... and when she herself has sworn to be brave and strong out here.

What she does instead, though, is pure madness.

It’s not planned. She definitely doesn’t intend to do it, not at all, but the world has a way of planting stupid ideas in her head and driving her to see them through despite her better judgement.

Really, it’s not even her fault that it happens. Technically speaking, all she does is flop down onto the bed (which, for the record, is exactly as uncomfortable as it looks), with the genuine intention of trying to get some sleep... only, as she hits the surface, her phone kind of falls out of her pocket and bounces onto the floor. And, yeah, of course she has to go and rescue it, because it’s her _phone_ for the love of whatever, and surviving out here in the middle of nowhere with an angst-ridden Pete (to say nothing of her own angsteracious angstiness too) is gonna be tough enough without having to deal with losing her only source of Angry Birds.

She doesn’t mean to start thumbing through her contacts when she picks the thing back up; it just sort of happens. And she definitely, _definitely_ doesn’t mean to linger on Myka’s number, because that’s just inviting a world of pain into her heart and her head, and pretty much every part of her. It hits her right between the eyes, the shock of it – ‘Myka’ staring back at her, like she’s not a hundred thousand miles away, like she’s not cut herself out of Claudia’s life, like she’s not run the hell away from all the things she’s supposed to care about – and she finds herself biting back on a sob. Only, of course, she’s in the middle of nowhere; there’s no Leena here to catch the tears in her shoulder, and the pillows are too thin to muffle the sounds, and so she can’t let herself cry. She can’t.

She’s so desperate for a distraction that, before she even realises she’s doing it (because she’s sure as hell not _thinking_ about it), she’s hitting ‘call’.

Of course, it goes straight to voicemail. What was she expecting?

She hangs up. Freaks the hell out for a minute or two (or maybe ten). Takes a couple of deep and steadying breaths... then, before her brain has a chance to figure out what the hell the rest of her is doing, she’s trying again.

This time, she’s prepared for the automated response, and, when Myka’s too-calm voice tells her to leave a message, she actually does.

“Myka! Hey. Hi. Hey. It’s, uh, it’s me.” She smacks her head back against the wall, disgusted with herself. “I mean, uh, of course it’s me. You know that already. ’Cause, yeah, hey, it’s not like you’ve got Caller ID or anything. But, uh, so... hey. Pete and I are on the road, being all awesome and findin’ all the epic artefacts and stuff... and he’s gone to bed and I’m kinda, y’know, not so tired, so I figured... y’know, I figured I’d just, y’know, call. To say hi. So, uh. Hi. Hey.”

She pauses for breath, pretty sure that she sounds like a total spaz. Not that Myka will be able to make out the words, anyway, they’re falling out of her so damn fast. It gets even worse, though, when she finds herself so caught up in a cycle of humiliated self-loathing that she forgets for a second or two that, actually, she’s still on the line, and she’s been silent for way, way, way longer than she should have.

“Oh!” she yelps, because she has to break the silence with something, and that feels a little bit less pathetically stupid than _‘so, yeah, I’m still here’_. “...so, uh, Myka...” She swallows, then just goes for broke because she has nothing left to lose. “So, hey! I know you made your choice and all, and that’s cool, y’know, we totally respect that. But...” Her throat gets real tight, but she powers right through it because she has to. “Thing is, Myka, we miss you. Pete misses you, and Artie misses you, and Leena... well, uh, Leena’s just kinda sulking ’cause no-one’ll eat her breakfasts when you aren’t here, and... and... and yeah, y’know, I miss you too.” She closes her eyes, breathes in, deep and tremulous. “I really, _really_ miss you.”

The admission hurts, a lot, but she forces herself to keep going.

“I mean, don’t get me wrong. I’m... I’m totally, totally cool with you being wherever you are that isn’t here... and I totally, totally get it, and all that stuff, y’know? I do, Myka, I swear I get it. You gotta do what you gotta do, and that’s cool, y’know, it’s totally cool and fine and awesome. I don’t... I mean I... I’m not mad at you for leaving us, Myka, I’m really not. I just...” She’s clinging to the phone, she realises, gripping it so hard that her fingers are seizing up. “It’s just... it’s just, I really miss you. So... so... come back soon? Please?”

It ends more tearfully than she’d intended (not that she’d intended any of this, of course), and the second she hangs up, her brain catches the hell up with the rest of her and makes her realise exactly what she’s just done.

Of course, she can’t take it back now, so she does the only thing she can think of.

She throws her phone down on the bed, watches as it bounces a couple of times, then punches the ever-loving crap out of the wall.

\--- 

Pete eats an entire six-pack of donuts for breakfast.

Supposedly, it’s “for the good of the mission”. At least, that’s the way he’s spinning it, but Claudia can tell that he’s just making a big show of pretending to be his old self for her sake. She appreciates it, really, but it’s not exactly comforting to see how hard he has to try. Still, though, she offers a dutiful little laugh, and nibbles dejectedly on the smallest piece of toast she’s been able to find.

“Good to see you eating again,” he says softly, and she flushes.

“Yeah, well. You too.”

He shrugs, like it’s not even a thing worth mentioning. “Gotta keep the ol’ strength up, right?”

Claudia sighs, and looks sadly at her half-eaten toast. It’s been really hard work, getting through even just that much of it, and she’s still feeling like an idiot after last night. Her appetite is long gone, not that it was ever really there in the first place, and surely half a slice of toast is better than nothing...

Pete bumps her shoulder, gently encouraging, and musters a smile that seems to come as hard to him as eating does to her. “Claud.”

(...apparently not.)

Her mind flashes briefly back to the B&B, to Leena and their daily argument about this; she pictures her all lit up and nodding her approval at the notion that Claudia might actually be eating something, and without prompting, even if it is just a tiny piece of toast. It’s a nice thought, making the annoying woman actually proud of her, instead of just sympathetic or pitying, and a vision of that sun-bright smile, burned onto her mind’s eye, spurs Claudia on to finish the rest of the slice.

Besides, though he may be talking – and eating – crap, Pete ultimately makes a pretty good point. They’re both gonna need their strength.

\--- 

Finding the artefact, as it turns out, isn’t the hard part.

The thing about a recording that incites a state of paranoid panic in anyone who listens to it is that the trail it leaves is pretty damn easy to follow. All it really takes is two or three terrified civilians running out from a sleazy-looking amusement arcade, screaming their heads off about Martians, and that’s the ‘hunting’ part of their jobs all done.

The hard part, then, is actually getting close enough to the stupid thing to snag it without falling prey to its powers... and, seriously, for the love of all things holy, what in the hell kind of lame Space-Invaders-themed amusement arcade plays the same freaking soundtrack on an endlessly repeating loop for all eternity?

Claudia’s had her head screwed with more than enough times in her life thus far to know when it’s happening. She recognises the pull of something irrational at the corners of her mind, senses the irrationality wrapping around her, trying to drag her down into the familiar darkness. She knows the feeling far too well, understands it way more intimately than anyone her age – or anyone at all – ever should, and so she’s kind of prepared for the moment when it hits. She swallows, tries to fight back visions of straitjackets and white walls, and bites down.

She won’t let herself give in to the panic, the fear. She won’t let herself be taken again by the madness. Not while she still has any amount of strength left in her. Goddammit, she will not let it beat her again!

A quick glance at Pete, however, is enough to tell her that he isn’t nearly so self-aware as she is. His eyes are getting glassy already, and she can tell that she’s going to lose him completely if they don’t grab and neutralise the stupid thing, and quickly.

“Y’know,” he murmurs, close to her ear, like he doesn’t want anyone else to overhear them, and the frightened edge in his voice confirms everything she’s been suspecting. “They kind of have a point.”

He means the terror-stricken masses, she supposes as they watch another crowd of panicked tourists flock past, and she pinches the bridge of her nose, already weary; it’s too early for this stuff to be taking such a toll on her, and she’s angry with herself. Why can’t these things ever be freakin’ easy?

“No, Pete,” she sighs, trying futilely to keep it together on both of their behalf. “They do not have a point.”

“Sure they do,” he insists. “We see crazy world-ending nutsoid stuff all the time, right? I mean, jeez, we just saved the world from the real-life HG Wells!” Claudia feels herself flinch, her whole body rejecting the words, fighting them down as they rise like bile in her throat, but she refuses to make a sound. Not that she has any time to, anyway, ’cause Pete’s still going strong. “After all the wacko crap we’ve seen, who are we to say that the Martians _aren’t_ coming for us!?”

Claudia groans. This was so totally not covered in the manual. “Pete...”

“I mean, not that it even matters, anyway,” he goes on, and she knows too intimately that breathy edge of near-hysteria in his voice. She remembers hearing it, feeling it, in her own voice too... though, in her case, it was usually followed by drugs and diagnosis and doctors, not so much the elbow to the ribs that she gives Pete in the here and now.

“Snap out of it, dude!”

“No, _you_ snap out of it!” he throws back (’cause, yeah, that’s mature). His eyes are dark and haunted, though, and they remind her that this is really serious. “If the aliens don’t get us, the super-villains will! You really think HG’s the only psychotic gender-bending hundred-and-fifty-year-old writer out there?!”

“Pretty sure she is, actually...” Claudia mumbles, burying her face in her hands.

“Well, you’re wrong! They’re everywhere, Claud! _Everywhere_! And they’re just waiting for us to drop our guard, waiting for us to let ’em into our homes, so they can just... just turn around and trample all over our carpets with their muddy boots and their big words and their grappling hooks – I ask you, Claud, who even uses a grappling hook!? – and just stomp all over our hearts and our souls, and—”

“Pete...”

“—and you’d think that’ll be enough for ’em, but you’d be wrong! ’Cause then they gotta try and destroy the world too! And then, just when you think they can’t do anything worse than what they’ve already done, they go and...” His voice cracks then, like a lake of ice with too much weight on it, and Claudia’s pretty sure this is the first time she’s heard it do that. “...they go and chase our partners away.”

Claudia’s stomach turns, and she kind of wishes that she hadn’t eaten breakfast after all. She is so, so, so out of her depth right now.

“You think you’re safe,” Pete raves. “You think it’s all cool and fun and _‘how bad can they be?’_. But they’re _real_ bad, Claud! Real bad. And then they take away everything that’s important to you, and we can’t let that happen!” He sounds so scared, so viscerally frightened that Claudia can feel it start to infect her as well; in spite of all of her preparedness, in spite of everything she knows about this dark and dangerous road, she’s starting to slip. “We can’t let it happen, Claud. We can’t let the League of Psychotic Old-School English Writers beat us! You and me, we gotta make a stand!”

Claudia shuts her eyes, tries to remember how to breathe. It’s really very possible that she’s not doing such a great job of fighting off the stupid thing’s effects herself by now, because, dammit, she can’t help thinking that maybe he’s not completely wrong, and what if he’s actually right, and if he is, then... oh, God...

...she so totally cannot deal with a homicidal George Eliot right now, okay? She just can’t.

“Pete,” she forces out through gritted teeth. “Dude, c’mon.”

He looks at her, tangibly horrified. “You could be next, y’know,” he blurts out, and he sounds so utterly convinced that Claudia feels the icy talons of her own panic closing in around her throat. “The next newbie could do it to you. Break your heart and make you leave. Or, like, make you go all end-of-the-world crazy. You got the whole reformed-psycho bit under your belt already, right?” He turns on her, wide-eyed, and she can see behind his eyes all the things she’s so scared of seeing in herself. “Oh my God, Claud, you’re gonna go all _HG_!”

It should upset her, the way that he says that, but it doesn’t. At least, not in the way it should. Because, yeah, he’s right. She’s been thinking it herself, ever since Myka left, and the only difference between the two of them is that he’s got the stones to actually say the words out loud, to look her right in the eye and tell her to her face, while she’s still hiding behind weakness and fear and childlike petulance.

So, no, it’s not the words themselves that hurt, even though they probably should. What does hurt, though, is the way that he’s looking at her. The panic in his eyes, the soul-rending terror, and she knows it’s all just a product of the artefact’s effect, knows that it’s not really _Pete_ looking at her right now, but knowing the facts of it doesn’t take away what she sees behind his eyes.

He’s looking at her like she’s even worse than HG, like she’s already on that path, like she’s beyond saving even now. He’s looking at her like she’s about to shoot him right in the head, like she’d do that now, without even stopping to think about it. He’s looking at her like she’s already that person, like she’s already turned, like she’s already a servant of darkness or whatever, like there’s so little hope for her she might as well have already lost herself.

That’s what really hurts. Not the fact that he’s said it’s possible, but the way his eyes are telling her that he thinks it’s _inevitable_. Like it doesn’t matter what she does or how hard she tries, like nothing matters at all, like all it’s gonna take is one ill-placed newbie, and she’ll be spiralling off that edge like she never stood a chance.

He doesn’t trust her to pull herself out. She can see it in his eyes, the stark horror when he looks at her, like he’s not looking at his friend at all, but staring at a monster, like she’s this destructive force, a wild creature tearing at a chain that isn’t strong enough to hold it in check. Like he’s not trying to figure out _if_ she’s going to break, but _when_.

That’s what hurts. The words, she can endure, but his eyes? Those, she can’t fight.

“Pete,” she says again, and it’s getting really, really hard to stay calm now; she can feel her own panic shaking through, and it’s only the voice in the back of her head – _“you said you’d have his back, now do it!”_ – that’s keeping her from losing it. “Dude, come on. We gotta goo this freakin’ thing before it takes us both.”

“That’s what they want us to do!” Pete warns, and it takes all the restraint Claudia has in her to keep from slapping him, or her own forehead, or both.

“Yeah, dude,” she says instead, with way more patience than she actually has. “It’s what Artie and Mrs F want us to do. And you know why? Because it’s our job, dude! It’s our job, and if we don’t do it, people die. People actually frackin’ _die_ , Pete... and I don’t know about you, but I don’t want that on my conscience.”

Admittedly, making a sweeping sensationalist statement like that probably isn’t the most helpful thing she could’ve done (more panic is pretty much the last thing in the whole universe that either of them need), but she really can’t think of anything else that might snap him out of it... and, regardless of anything else, it’s freakin’ _true_. And, really, Claudia needs to remember that herself every bit as much as she needs to make Pete hear it. 

As it happens, it seems to break through to him, at least a little bit, because he shakes his head kind of dazedly and looks at her like she’s actually said something worth hearing. Which, given that she’s still her and he’s still him, is kind of the biggest thing she can hope for, not just now, but pretty much ever.

“We gotta stop it, Claud!” he yelps in a terrified squeak. “We gotta stop it!”

“That’s what I’ve been saying, dumbass,” she mutters, and drags him away.

It’s about twenty minutes, if even that, to find and neutralise the thing, once Pete starts co-operating like a proper agent (or, at least, as close to one as he ever gets); the only really tricky part is convincing the arcade staff that, yes, it really _is_ a matter of national security that they obtain immediate access to the venue’s complete catalogue of old-school invasion-themed recordings.

The damage is kind of already done, though, and, just like the real HG Wells, its effects linger in a way that can’t be neutralised by a flash of purple sparks.

\--- 

Pete is uncharacteristically quiet for the entire journey home. He doesn’t say anything at all (not even to complain when Claudia plays with the radio, cruising the ever-present static snow for a single semi-listenable tune) until they’re barely an hour from home. And then, of course, he decides it’s the perfect moment to bare his soul.

“I’m sorry, Claud,” he says softly, sounding wracked with guilt, if still a little freaked. “I shouldn’t have said any of that stuff.”

Claudia shrugs. “Artefacts make you do the wacky.”

He blinks, but doesn’t ask, and it’s such a rare thing that she actually manages to find a pop-culture reference that he doesn’t get straight away that she actually kind of feels a little bit proud of herself. Not that it’s likely to do much to dissuade him from trying to talk about this crap, but, hey, she’ll take any little victory she can get.

“I know,” he says. “I know it was the artefact. Good ol’ HG Wells, doing more damage, even when she’s not even here.” He sounds so bitter, so flat-out angry, that Claudia recoils in spite of herself, her chest and her stomach flashing hot and cold by turns. “I know that’s all it was. But I still shouldn’t have said it. I should’ve been tougher. And, hey, uh...” He sighs, eyes sliding shut for a second or two before he seems to remember that he is, in fact, still driving, and therein kinda really needs to keep them open. “Look, Claud. I know you’re not gonna turn out like her. Okay? You’re _not_ gonna turn out that way, and I know that, and I don’t... I don’t know where that stuff came from, because I trust you. I know you’re gonna be a better person than her. I know you are, Claud. So don’t you dare pay no attention to any of that crap I said. You hear me, runt?”

The apology is sweet, but the words aren’t true. Claudia knows how panic works, knows it intimately, and she knows that he wouldn’t have said what he did if there wasn’t a part of him that really and truly did believe it.

But that’s kind of okay, she thinks darkly. ’Cause, hey, she believes it herself, so why shouldn’t he?

She’s not going to let him see any of that, though. It’s kinder to let him take comfort in his delusions, his pretence that things are okay now just because he can hide his doubts again, shove them away into that dusty little corner of his brain that nobody ever talks about. And besides, what good would it do either of them if she called him on it?

“I know, dude,” she says instead, and the lie twists like a knife in her heart.

\--- 

Artie and Leena are waiting for them when they get back to the Warehouse.

Pete throws the static bag at Artie and mutters something about having his report ready in the morning. They all know it’s total bull – even if it wasn’t obvious that he’s not in the best mood at the moment, Pete has never handed in a report on time in his entire career (or, at least, definitely not for as long as Claudia’s known him, and no doubt way before that too). Still, though, seeming to know better than to challenge him right now, Artie just nods and lets him stalk out of the room.

Claudia feels a little awkward, standing there and shuffling her feet with Artie and Leena staring at her like they’re waiting for a blow-by-blow commentary of the whole mission; she doesn’t really want to engage in conversation with anyone right now, so, in the hopes of getting them off her back, she offers to take the artefact and shelf it for them.

Neither of them seem to take any offense at the idea, though they don’t exactly praise her for her selflessness either. Artie’s contribution is to shout after her, very loudly and pointedly, “ _Orson_ Welles, Claudia...” It’s a reminder that he must know she doesn’t need (she was the one who snagged and bagged it, after all), but still he carries on, “... _not_ the other one.”

“I know, I know...” she gripes, putting her earphones in and blasting Nirvana so loud that she blocks out the diatribe about respect and discipline that she’s sure is about to hit like a typhoon in her wake.

With the seed of the ‘other one’ planted in her head now, though, she kind of feels like it’s kind of a moral obligation for her to detour. She shelves the artefact where it’s supposed to be first, of course, but then, instead of going back to Artie and Leena and their irritatingly expressive faces, she takes a hard left. And then another, and then a couple of rights, until she’s right there where she shouldn’t be, standing in front of that ominous cordoned-off section that she’s only ever been in once before, and... and it’s exactly like she remembers it, right down to the last detail, so much kickass coolness all in one place, and her eyes sting sharply at the sight of it.

HG must have been really epically brilliant, she muses sadly (like she didn’t already know that), to have a section this big dedicated to her life and work.

She thinks about it, and she can’t help wondering if the same thing will be said of the ‘Claudia Donovan’ section in a hundred years’ time or whatever, when she’s been bronzed and de-bronzed and re-bronzed again. She wonders, too, if she’d even want it to be, if she’d really want to leave behind this kind of a legacy if she’s just going to screw it all up with dark thoughts and dark actions anyway. Does she want to give the world a reason to respect her if she’s just gonna try and nuke it all to hell anyway?

She doesn’t want to hurt people like HG hurt them, doesn’t want to let down anyone dumb enough to think that maybe she’s kind of awesome. Not that she can really imagine anyone thinking about her in those terms anyway... but if she one day learned to write books or invent stuff or something, like HG did? Well, maybe. It’s not _completely_ impossible, she figures, somewhat grudgingly.

But the more she thinks about it, the more she thinks about the look on Myka’s face every time she looked at HG, and the giddy little triple-beat in her own heart every time she herself did... the more she remembers how star-struck they both were, in their own little ways, how much it hurt to be proved so wrong and finally see the truth behind the genius, the darkness that could not be explained away by artefacts or interference or anything at all except a twisted soul... the more she thinks about it all, the more she realises that the price of letting people down is way too high. And she, Claudia... she’s not nearly so tough as someone like HG Wells. She’s not that strong, and she never will be. So there’s no way that she could handle that kind of pressure – the expectations of a world in awe – on top of everything else.

So, no. No, she doesn’t want a legacy. She doesn’t want the world to see her as a genius, to see in her a great mind or a great person or a great anything. She wants them to see her, right from the start, for what she really is. Nothing more and nothing less, she wants them to see and know and understand that she isn’t a genius, isn’t a great mind, isn’t anything at all, that she’s just a compulsive screw-up, a young, dumb punk with leanings towards inhuman clumsiness. That way, when she screws up on a global, world-ending basis, at least nobody will be disappointed.

But then, she’s not exactly disappointed in HG, either. She’s hurt, crushed, broken in more ways than she can count... but she’s not disappointed. Honestly, she kind of can’t help thinking that maybe it was their fault, what happened. Maybe they didn’t make her feel sufficiently welcome, didn’t help her acclimatise to the modern world well enough, didn’t do enough for her in any one of a thousand ways.

Even now, with all the pain and the hurt, the fallout of what HG did to them still so fresh and raw, an open sore so much more painful than the rough-edged inner torment that Kurt Cobain’s singing about in her ears (and it’s not a coincidence, the way Claudia is drawn to his music beyond all else at times like these, another lost soul, another doomed spirit, another destructive heart she feels such a kinship with; no, it’s not a coincidence)... even with it all so present, so immediate and right there in front of her, she still can’t quite bring herself to feel like it was HG’s fault.

And that’s scary. It’s scary because she doesn’t want it to be HG’s fault. She believes it because she wants it, wants it so desperately that it hurts. She would do anything, anything in the whole freaking world to make it not be that way, to reshape the whole twisted mess into something that maybe could have been fixed. She wants so badly to make HG into someone who was pushed into doing what she did, who was driven instead of driving, because...

...because that way, when Claudia’s turn comes, she can claim it was the same.

She leans against the carcass of the time machine, tries to steady her breathing. Thinks about Pete, about what he said. Thinks, most of all, about the way he looked at her. Wonders what it says about her when the darkness is so clear that even he can see it so clearly. And she knows that Pete can be deceptively insightful, that he can be way smarter than people give him credit for, that maybe he plays up his boyish stupidity on purpose, just to throw people off-guard. She gets that, and so maybe she shouldn’t be surprised that he’s smart enough to catch the danger flickering under the surface of her. But it still hurts to know that he does. It still hurts to have actually physically seen it in him, to know beyond all doubt that someone who’s supposed to be her surrogate brother has the same doubts about her that she has about herself... and, so much worse than just that, that there is a part of him that has given her up as lost already.

That isn’t HG’s fault. She knows that. HG just gave a name to what was already there.

Pete will still blame her, of course – for his doubts, and for Claudia’s own – just like he still blames her for making Myka leave... and, okay, so maybe Claudia kind of still blames her for that a little bit, too; ending the world is one thing, but taking Myka away from them is just unforgivable. But, whoever he points the finger at, it doesn’t change the fact. Claudia has always known what lies inside of her; HG just made it a little more obvious.

The thing is (and maybe, to someone who isn’t Claudia, it would be the best part, but to her, it’s the worst), even before all of this, everyone else was already pushing her to do ‘great things’. Myka would look at her sometimes like she’s a little afraid of what she’ll become. Not in the bad way, the ending-the-world crazy kind of way, of course... but in the way that would let Claudia imagine (on some of her rare egotistical days) that maybe she’s thinking about how bright and brilliant she’s going to burn when she’s finished growing.

And then, of course, there’s Mrs F., who thinks she’s got what it takes to be the next... well, Mrs F. Which, uh, yeah. Claudia still feels physically sick just thinking about that.

Because that right there? That really _is_ greatness. Mrs Frederic is basically the dictionary definition of ‘epic’, so far as Claudia’s concerned. And there’s no way that the woman, this ghostly phantasm of epicness, could possibly know all of the things that go on inside Claudia’s head sometimes, because... because, if she did – if she suspected even a quarter of the things that haunt Claudia’s thoughts on a daily, hourly, minutely basis – there’s no way in hell that she’d trust her with guardianship of the Warehouse. Not even if she was the last person in the whole world. She’d just never do it. She would know that Claudia is simply too unstable.

So maybe she should tell her. Maybe she should make Mrs F. realise that it’s not just a bad call, it’s one that can’t ever be allowed to happen. Claudia can’t take the Warehouse; she _can’t_. And it’s not because she’s still young and dumb and scared of ‘responsibility’, or because she still has her life ahead of her and she doesn’t want to be tied to something eternal and immortal when she herself is still barely old enough to have evolved past the status of ‘stupid kid’. No, it’s because she’s dangerous. It’s because she is _really freaking dangerous_. The older she gets, she’s finding, the harder it is to fight the thing inside her, and the fact is that the kinds of thoughts that come so naturally to her – dark, twisted, broken thoughts about terrible things – are not the kind of thoughts that should ever be given any kind of power over anything at all, let alone the kind of absolute epic all-consuming power that Mrs Frederic has.

The more she thinks about HG and the things she did, the more she understands her. And the more she understands her, the less she wants to.

\--- 

“I thought I’d find you here.”

Claudia glances up, and immediately lets out a loud groan. “Shouldn’t you be making dinner or something?”

Leena chuckles, undeterred. “Probably, yes. But I’m here instead.”

“Great. Awesome. Fabulous.” It’s completely deadpan, but Claudia can tell (even as she turns back away and refuses to meet her gaze) that Leena will do that obnoxious little thing she does sometimes, where she makes a show of taking the words at face value and making like she can’t read the sarcasm in them.

“You didn’t shelf that artefact here, did you?” she asks, pretending like she’s all business when even a blind idiot – even _Artie_! – could see that she’s bluffing. “Artie specifically said to file it under ‘Orson Welles’, not ‘HG Wells’, and you know how cranky he gets when you don’t listen to him.”

“Oh my God!” Claudia slaps the edge of the time machine, a little more violently than she probably should have, and the whole thing shakes precariously. She forces herself to calm down, and huffs a sigh. “No, Leena, I did not shelf it here,” she grunts, mechanical. “Yes, Leena, I made sure to shelf it under ‘Orson Welles’. Like, a hundred thousand hours ago.” She doesn’t give Leena an opening to congratulate her, rushing on without even looking back. “Is that all? ’Cause I’m kind of busy here, if you don’t mind.”

“Oh, of course.” There’s an infuriating smile in Leena’s voice. “Yes, I can see how busy you are.”

In a stroke of genius (or possibly one of idiocy, it’s kind of hard to tell), Claudia decides to play this stupid game Leena’s way. “Good,” she says, acting like she actually believes it. “Then you can see that I can’t be distracted right now, and that you should go away for your own safety.”

Leena sighs, and, seeing that she’s not going to get what she wants by humouring her, drops the gentle façade. “Claudia...”

“I hate when you do that,” Claudia whines, the words out before she can stop herself. “I really, really hate when you say my name. You always make it sound like...”

She swallows hard, because even just thinking about it hurts. She wants to say _‘like Myka’_ , but of course she can’t . Because Leena isn’t Myka, and Myka isn’t here, and voicing her name out loud will only make both of their hearts ache.

“Whatever,” she says instead, for about the hundredth time that day, because it’s her go-to word when she needs to say something but can’t think of anything. “Just quit saying it, okay?”

“If that’s what you want,” Leena says softly. “I didn’t mean to upset you. I just don’t know what else to call you.”

She doesn’t sound hurt, exactly, and definitely not offended, but there’s something a little weird in her voice just the same. Like maybe she’s trying a little too hard to not be hurt, and Claudia has to throw that thought as far away from her mind as she can because she just can’t deal with the idea that maybe she’s upset Leena now too. She’s angry, rebellious, and she wants to be alone... but Leena has been good to her, so painfully good, and she doesn’t want to make her sad.

“I didn’t mean it like that,” she blurts out quickly, because she kind of feels like she owes it to her to make it better. “It’s just...”

“It’s all right,” she says. “I understand.”

And that’s all there is, because then she’s moving, unbidden and uninvited, to sit down. Like, right there on the dusty floor, like it’s the most natural place in the world, she’s sitting down, and looking up at Claudia like she hasn’t just been the most unapologetic brat in the universe.

“So,” she goes on, in that tone of voice she has that makes it clear she’s changing the subject now, and pats the space next to her. “Tell me about the mission.”

Claudia groans, but finds herself sitting down beside her just the same. Maybe, in addition to reading someone’s colours, the woman has a psychic ability to make them do whatever she wants; it wouldn’t surprise her, given the way she always manages to cut down Claudia’s own defences, even when they’re at their most impregnable.

“You know about the mission,” she points out, but reminds her just the same. “Orson Welles does HG Wells? The all-singing, all-dancing, live-action radio scare-a-thon?”

“I know about the _artefact_ ,” Leena corrects calmly. “I don’t know about the _mission_.”

She clearly knows something, though, Claudia thinks bitterly, or she wouldn’t be asking about it. Nobody asks about a mission unless they already suspect (or flat-out know) that something might have gone wrong somewhere down the line. And if there’s one thing that Claudia has learned never to take for granted in Leena, it’s her ability to see things that nobody has ever mentioned. Aural colours aside, even. Some stuff, she just intuitively knows, and it’s freaky as all hell, but it also makes it a little bit impossible to argue with her.

“You really wanna know?” Claudia demands evasively.

“I really want to know,” Leena affirms, not missing a beat.

She moves in closer, rests a hand on Claudia’s thigh, and the proximity throws Claudia off-guard just enough to jolt a sort-of answer out of her.

“It was totally fine,” she sputters, a blurted lie because she suddenly can’t think straight. “Pete was a dumbass d-bag, and I saved the day because I was awesome, and there’s no way Artie won’t let me go along on the next one too because I rocked the freakin’ casbah, and it was all great and cool and epic, and, and... and _jeez_ , Leena, we both got home in one piece, didn’t we, so why the third degree?”

“Claudia...”

“All right, fine!” And now she’s pretty close to 100% positive that she’s somehow being mind-controlled or something, because there’s no way in hell she would cave in this fast of her own volition. “So maybe the artefact kinda... affected us. A teeny tiny little bit. Maybe. Sort of. But it was only for like a minute, and then we snapped out of it and got it back, and nobody got hurt or killed or anything at all, so it obviously doesn’t even matter anyway, and I really don’t see what the big deal is...”

“It’s not a big deal,” Leena replies. It sounds like an agreement on the surface, but she’s looking at Claudia with a kind of intensity that makes her flush hot, and her nails are tracing distracting patterns across the fabric of her jeans, and it all feels like a trap. “Is it?”

“No.” She’s too fast, too hyper-defensive, and they both know it. “Of course it’s not. Quit asking stupid questions.”

She should just come out and say it. They’re right here, after all, in HG’s own personal section, surrounded by all the things she’s done, the ghost of her presence, the memory of her so vivid and rich that it’s almost as though she’s standing in front of them. It’s the perfect opportunity to bring her up, and probably the best chance Claudia will ever have to make it seem anything other than whiny when her thoughts come spilling out of her mouth.

But, for all that she wants to, she can’t. She really, truly can’t. And if there’s even the tiniest shred of decency in Leena, she’ll get that.

She does. Of course she does, because she really is the most annoying person on the planet and also the only one who really genuinely does get Claudia right now. So, yeah, of course she gets that now isn’t the time, that Claudia is struggling and scared, that she’s feeling too raw to speak without pain. She always gets it, always gets everything, and she sweeps up to her feet with all the grace of a swan, effortless and ethereal, and doesn’t even look back. It makes Claudia angry again, and she doesn’t understand why.

“I’ll see you tonight, then,” Leena says, all false brightness, and is gone.

\--- 

As infuriating as it is to be so predictable, she does indeed see Claudia that night.

Claudia is still kind of mad at her (in that deflected self-hatred kind of way) for wheedling her, but that doesn’t stop her creeping into her room, standing there in the doorway, framed by the dim half-light from the corridor outside and looking utterly pathetic. And Leena may still be sad that Claudia wasn’t able to share her feelings, but that doesn’t stop her pulling the covers back and shifting across to make room. And nothing in the world is enough to change the way that Claudia curls up, tight and protected against Leena’s side, or the way that Leena drapes a strong arm across her shoulders to keep her there.

It’s too hard to be defiant when it’s dark outside, and it’s too hard to be proud when the world is cold. The black of night has forged peace from far worse things than this, Claudia knows, and as she rests her head against the familiar curve of Leena’s shoulder, so much softer than the pillows, she finds that she doesn’t even care.

\--- 

“Tell me about my colours.”

Leena must have been asleep or something, because she sits up with a twitchy sort of jolt, and blinks blearily at her.

“I’m sorry?” she mumbles groggily. “What?”

Claudia sighs. She hates repeating herself, even at the best of times, and all the more so when it’s taken half the night for her find the courage to even say it the first time. Still, though, because she can see in the hazy confusion behind Leena’s eyes that she genuinely didn’t hear, she braces herself to say it again.

“My colours,” she says slowly. “Or my aura, or whatever you want me to call it. I wanna... I wanna know what it looks like. I wanna know what it says about me.”

Leena groans. “Claudia...”

“I know,” she says. “It’s like four-thirty in the morning or whatever, and you gotta be up in like an hour to make breakfast for everyone... and by ‘everyone’, I totally mean ‘no-one’, because it’s not like anyone’s gonna eat it anyway, and I know you just wanna go back to sleep and all, but—”

“Yes,” Leena says, cutting her off in a voice that is trapped somewhere between tired and exasperated. “Claudia, when I let you come into my bed, it was under the assumption that, if I fell asleep, you’d let me stay that way.”

“I know,” Claudia whines. “And I do.”

Which is true. Most of the time, she doesn’t much care if Leena’s awake or asleep; it’s her presence that’s comforting, not what she does with it. She’ll take just as much solace from the way she breathes when she’s sleeping, always so still and peaceful, as she will from the tenderness in her fingers as she idly trails them through Claudia’s hair when they’re both awake, barely even realising that she’s doing it at all until Claudia huffs and pretends to be offended.

So, yeah. Normally she wouldn’t care that Leena was asleep. She’d be a little bitter, possibly, kind of sulkily annoyed that Leena can find sleep while she herself still struggles night after night for just a minute or two of peace from the maelstrom in her head. But she wouldn’t wake her. Not unless it was important.

And this feels important. Or, at least, it feels that way to her; she’s burning white-hot with a need for connection, a need for contact, for _Leena_. She aches – her whole body shot through with actual physical pain – with the need to know, to hear it from someone who can really see her (and in a way that she can’t see herself), to be told, beyond all doubt, just how close to that edge she really is.

Tonight, she’s scared. Really, honest-to-whatever _scared_. And maybe Leena should have figured that out by the way that she hasn’t been crying – the way that she’s been clinging and trembling but not actually shedding a single tear – but apparently she was so busy falling asleep that she didn’t notice. Which, okay, is just fine... only Claudia is kind of really freaking out here, and the part of her that doesn’t feel so terrible about waking her up is kind of hurt that Leena and her stupid sixth sense can’t see how tortured she is right now, how urgent and important this feels.

“I didn’t mean to,” she blurts out, and the not-quite apology should tell her something too. “I didn’t mean to wake you or anything. I just...”

Leena sighs and shifts a little, like she’s coming out of her haze and realising that something’s not right, like it’s finally hitting her. She studies her for a moment or two, and Claudia can see the lines under her eyes as she does; she looks tired, still groggy, and the guilt surges up in Claudia for a second or two, just enough to shape another mumbled almost-apology, before the fear overwhelms her again and her body reminds her with another twitching tremor how desperately she needs this tonight.

“Claudia, what’s this about?” Leena asks after a moment, and Claudia supposes it’s a fair question. If she’s gonna get woken up in the middle of the night to answer a seemingly random question, the least she deserves in return is an explanation as to why it’s so important that it can’t wait just an hour or two for the sort-of morning to become actual morning.

The problem is, though, that Claudia is really, really bad at the whole ‘unburdening’ thing, and she’s about a thousand billion times worse at it with Leena than she is with anyone else. She’s kind of come to take for granted the fact that Leena can see into her soul, and that makes it easier to deflect what she’s feeling into pointless aggression and unnecessary rudeness. Leena isn’t like Myka, who could always wrench a confession out of her with a look or a head-tilt, and she’s not like Artie who is so freakin’ awful at it that he makes Claudia feel like a pro. She’s just Leena, elusive and a bit mystical, and Claudia has never quite learned how to strike that balance with her.

But right now it’s kind of different. Actually, it’s _very_ different, because they’re not out in the Warehouse, and Claudia can’t hide behind her headphones and her clipboard and the fact that they’re supposed to be doing their jobs.

She can’t hide behind bravado and her feigned cocksure attitude, because they’re here, and this is Leena’s bed, and she’s all bleary-eyed and half-asleep, and Claudia is in her pyjamas and small and scared, and she couldn’t hide that even if she tried to because it’s right there, because she’s curled up against her and the tremors are so tangible it would be impossible for Leena not to notice them. Her heart is right there on her sleeve, and her sleeve is wrapped around Leena’s middle, the contact pulling them together, and the whole thing is utterly inescapable and she knows she has nobody but herself to blame for this position she’s in now, because...

...because somehow, over the course of these shared nights, the rules have changed.

Claudia can’t just be Claudia any more. She can’t hide behind all the things that have always been so good at keeping her hidden. It won’t work here. They’re too close, physically and emotionally. Claudia knows it, and she knows that Leena knows it too, and before she even realises what she’s doing, she’s pressing her face against her neck and whispering, over and over and over again, _“I’m scared.”_

And then she’s telling her everything. The artefact, Pete, and herself, the way he freaked out and the way that she didn’t (and then kind of did), the way he looked right at her and said all the things she’s been trying so hard not to think about in herself, the horror in his eyes, the way that she understands HG even though she really doesn’t want to... everything, all of it, the words and the pain pouring out of her like spilled milk, and she can tell that Leena’s kind of struggling to keep up with it all (or any of it), but she just can’t hold it back.

“Claudia.” Leena swallows. “Claudia, stop.”

She does. Cuts herself off mid-word, in fact, and fights to catch her breath. She can feel Leena’s pulse right next to her own, and the other woman is so eerily calm that it makes her own heartbeat feel all the more unnaturally fast pressed up against it.

“I didn’t...” she mumbles again, and she doesn’t even know what she’s trying to say.

“Claudia.”

She’s in her arms, then, wrapped up so tight that she can barely breathe, and Leena is murmuring her name over and over again into the top of her head, and it’s not like before in the Warehouse, where the sound of her name was like a blow. It’s so different here, in this room, in her bed. Leena isn’t saying her name to address her, she’s saying it because it’s all she has, like she can hold the demons inside her, like she can seal up Claudia’s thoughts with her voice.

And Claudia so desperately wants to believe that that’s exactly what’s happening here, that it’s possible, that Leena really can hold the bad parts of her down. She wants to believe it, just like she wanted to believe Artie, back before all of this, back when he promised that her future wasn’t all planned out, that she wasn’t just a slave to the Warehouse with no thought for her own life... but she can no more believe this now than she could believe that then. However painful the truth is, the lies are too transparent, and not even her deluded mind will allow her to trust them.

“Tell me about my colours,” she whispers again, the words hopelessly lost to the curve of Leena’s collarbone.

Leena sighs, but doesn’t pull back. Her hands are like butterflies, fluttering nervously across the planes of Claudia’s back, the movements somewhere between a comforting caress and a nervous twitch, and Claudia feels her muscles responding to the touches in unfamiliar ways.

“Claudia, I can’t tell you what you want to know.”

“Why not?” Claudia demands, reflexively angry, even as she knows that’s the opposite of helpful right now.

“Because I can’t,” she answers simply. “I’m sorry.”

It’s too evasive, and it throws up about a thousand questions in Claudia’s mind. Is it because this ‘aura’ crap doesn’t work that way? Because everything in her is so overwhelmed right now by the fear and the confusion that Leena can’t see past that? Because she’s not really so all-knowing as she claims to be? Or is it because she really can see it, all of it, everything, but it’s the exact opposite of what Claudia wants to hear?

“Leena,” she whimpers, and pulls back. “Leena, please.”

There’s real pain in Leena’s eyes, sorrow and grief overpowering even the tiredness, and she’s looking at Claudia like she’s never seen her before. “Claudia...”

“Leena!” Claudia is beyond terrified now, and way beyond desperate. “Just tell me. Tell me I’m not gonna end up like her. Tell me I’m gonna be okay.” She’s shaking so hard, so violently that her teeth are chattering, and she can’t think. “Lie to me if you have to. Just _tell me_!”

Leena’s shaking too, but not so brutally as Claudia. She’s trembling gracefully, like she does everything gracefully, a perfect tremor in her hands as she throws back the covers.

“I have to start breakfast,” she says softly.

“No, you don’t!” Claudia’s clinging to her, gripping her arm so tight that she knows it probably hurts. “You don’t have to start breakfast, ’cause nobody’s gonna eat it. I’m not gonna, Pete’s not gonna, Artie’s not gonna. Hell, even _you_ probably won’t... so, unless you’re expecting Mrs F. to stop by for a croissant and a spot of tea, you really, really _don’t_ have to start breakfast.” It’s really quite unfair, she knows, but she just can’t stop. “Nobody cares about your frackin’ breakfast, Leena. Nobody cares!”

“Claudia.” Leena’s voice is effortfully calm, strained but as steady as it always is; given the circumstances, that’s quite an achievement. “Stop it.”

“Please,” Claudia whispers. “Leena, _please_. Please.”

“I have to start breakfast,” she says again, and tears her arm free seemingly with no effort at all, like Claudia’s fingers were made of paper. “I have to go and start breakfast now.”

And then she’s gone again, like she’s been taking lessons from Mrs Frederic, and Claudia is left alone with the memory of Pete’s horror-stricken eyes and a tangle of sheets that burn hot against the pain in her chest.

\--- 


	3. The Memories Are Shadows

\--- 

The following night, everything changes.

Claudia is standing there in the doorway, just like she has done for the last few nights in a row, waiting for the unspoken invitation, for Leena to huff a practiced sigh and pull back the covers and scoot across to the other side of the bed, giving Claudia room to crawl in and curl up next to her. It’s become a kind of routine, and it happens the same way every night, and Claudia knows how everything is supposed to play out because they’re both kind of well-schooled in this thing by now.

Except, this time, it’s all different. Claudia is doing her part just the same, standing there at the threshold, looking ten kinds of awkward and feeling even more so, waiting like she always does... only, instead of doing her thing too, playing it the way she always does, Leena’s just kind of sitting halfway up in the bed and _looking_ at her.

It’s a few moments before anything happens, and, when she finally does make a move, it’s not to do her usual thing at all. No. What she does instead is close her eyes, take a deep breath, and murmur, almost too low to be heard, “Not tonight, Claudia.”

Claudia recoils. The words lash like a whip, and for a second she’s too busy reeling from them to do or say anything at all. But then it catches up with her, and she supposes that she must have misheard. She must have, because there’s no way that Leena would send her away. Maybe, on a bad day, Myka might... but this is Leena, and she can see Claudia’s colours, and she knows her and she gets her and she understands her. She _understands_ her, for the love of whatever, and there’s no possible way she’d just throw Claudia out in the middle of the night when she’s lonely and frightened.

So, yeah. She must have misheard. She must have. It’s the only explanation.

“Say again?” 

She’s giving Leena a chance to correct herself, to take the words back (if she did actually say them the way Claudia’s still so certain she misheard) and fall back into their usual thing without so much as another word. She’s really giving it everything she can here, but Leena’s not buying it. And, instead of taking the hand Claudia’s thrown out for her, instead of being the person that Claudia needs, the person she’s needed for the last few nights, the person she’s been so happy to be up until this point, she just shakes her head, sorrowful and strained, and exhales.

“I don’t think you should come in here tonight,” she says, elucidating the point in her usual murky, fog-ridden way. “I’m sorry, Claudia, but I really don’t think it’s a good idea.”

“Why not?” Claudia demands; she realises that she probably sounds like a very tiny child whose security blanket has just been taken away, but, to be honest, that’s kind of exactly how she feels.

“Because it’s not,” Leena replies, like that’s an explanation, and Claudia really just wants to slap her now, until she starts saying words that constitute some kind of actual reason.

“Leena,” she whines instead. “Leena, look, hey... I’m sorry about the whole ‘colours’ thing. I really am. You don’t gotta kick me out just because of that. I won’t ask again, I swear. I was just... it was just a stupid thing. I was just a little freaked. I didn’t mean to...”

“I know,” Leena says softly. “But even so.”

Claudia stares at her. There’s a tightness to her jaw that isn’t usually there, a kind of quiet determination in her eyes; she looks as close to aggressive as Claudia has ever seen her, and that in itself is a worrying sign. Still, though, because Claudia is Claudia, she can’t just take that kind of rejection lying down (or, well, in this case, standing up). She has to fight, has to defend herself, to take control of this situation before it breaks her. Even though she knows it’s not her place, that this is Leena’s room, _her_ private sanctuary, not Claudia’s, and that she has the right to let in (or not let in) anyone she likes... still, Claudia has to fight for this.

“You’re really just gonna kick me out?” she asks; her own would-be aggression is quite pitifully subsumed by kicked-puppy woundedness, but it hurts too much for her to care. “Just like that?”

“I’m sorry, Claudia,” Leena sighs sadly, and, to her credit, she does kind of sound like she actually means that, like it really is a sacrifice she’s making here. “I think it’s for the best, for both of us.”

“Not for me!” Claudia insists desperately. “It’s not ‘for the best’ for me. Dammit, Leena, I...”

She trails off. Her throat’s tight and all closed up and she just... she just can’t. She can’t, because if she says one more word, she is going to lose it completely. The fight is draining out of her, water from a swimming pool, and she’s going to shatter if she stays here, just fall apart completely, and she can’t let Leena see that. She won’t.

So she does the only thing that she can do, under the circumstances; angry and broken and in pain, she spins on her heels and storms out. Runs back to her own room – cold and dark and scary as it is – and slams the door as hard as she can.

And, okay, if there’s one good thing to be said of this... this whatever the hell it is... it’s that, when she does crawl back into her own bed, curls up and wraps her own cold covers around herself, she doesn’t cry.

The truth of the matter is, she’s just too freaking stubborn. There’s probably a part of her that’s too damn tired as well, too exhausted to even make the tears at all, much less actually shed them, but the vast majority of her simply doesn’t want to give Leena the satisfaction of knowing how upset she is.

So, instead, she hides under her covers, stays there all night like a sulking brat in the aftermath of a tantrum. And, yeah, okay, so she knows that she’s being petulant, but then, isn’t Leena being petulant too? Kicking her out just because she had a momentary freak-out and woke her up? Isn’t that why they started with this stupid little ‘arrangement’ in the first place – because of all the momentary freak-outs that she’d been having by herself?

Well, whatever. She refuses to let herself care. Leena can do whatever the hell she wants. Claudia doesn’t want her. She doesn't need her, goddammit. Doesn’t need Leena, or her stupid too-comfy bed, or her obnoxiously soft covers, or her deceptively strong arms, or the curve of her shoulder, or... or... or...

“Dammit!” she yells, and beats up her pillows until morning comes.

\--- 

She skulks downstairs way too late for the daily breakfast diatribe, and immediately wishes she hadn’t.

Artie is there. She can hear his voice, gruff and impatient, from about halfway up the stairs, and she can tell that he’s arguing with Leena. Which, in turn, means that they’re probably arguing about her.

Half a sentence out of his mouth, and it’s confirmed.

“—want me to do about it? She never listens to me!”

“She listens more than you think she does,” Leena says patiently. (It’s probably true, that point, but Claudia’s not about to admit to it.) “But that’s not what I was going to suggest. I don’t think talking to her is going to help this time.” She sighs, and Claudia feels a flashing pulse of self-loathing at how exhausted she sounds, and how that is so completely her fault; she really didn’t plan for any of this to happen. “She’s angry, Artie. Really, really angry. She needs an outlet for it, or it’ll poison her.”

“She’s a teenager,” Artie retorts, characteristically dismissive, and Claudia imagines him waving both his hands around in lieu of anything to hold in them. “They’re always angry.”

“Not like this,” Leena says softly.

Suddenly, Claudia finds herself biting down on the inside of her cheek; it’s not quite hard enough to cut through, but it’s definitely hard enough to hurt, and she finds that the throbbing pain is actually kind of comforting. That alone, she supposes, should probably be telling her that, at least with this, Leena might actually be right; drawing relief from physical pain isn’t exactly the kind of thing that normal (which is to say, not crazy) people do.

She doesn’t continue down the stairs, or announce her presence. She’s too curious to see where this ‘discussion’ goes, so instead she stays where she is, listening to them.

“Send her out into the field,” Leena suggests. “Not just for one thorny mission that Pete can’t handle on his own. Let her get a taste of being a real agent.” She pauses, and Claudia imagines that teasing little half-smile on her face, the one that she reserves exclusively for when she’s trying to make Artie do something he doesn’t want to. “And, besides... it’s not like we don’t need the extra pair of hands right now, is it?”

There’s a long, protracted silence, maybe half a minute or so. Then—

“All right!” It’s Artie, conceding at last (because it’s inevitable, as Claudia knows all too well), and, though he’s making a big show of being unhappy about the idea, he’s giving in so fast that this can’t possibly be the first time he’s thought about it himself. “If it’ll get you off my back for five minutes, I’ll let her play agent for a while.” His voice lowers then, sharp and sudden, and Claudia has to really strain to hear what he says next. “One day, Leena, that soft spot you have for her is going to get you into trouble.”

Leena chuckles; it’s wan, but warm. “I think that can be said of us both.”

The observation is light, non-accusatory, and, if Artie’s silence is anything to go by, he can’t deny it (even if he wants to). Claudia almost smiles at that thought.

It’s getting kind of awkward now, though, all this hovering on the stairs and listening to them talk about her, and she’s just about to double back, to sneak back up to her room and pretend that she wasn’t there at all, when (of course) Leena raises her voice.

“You can stop eavesdropping now, Claudia,” she calls cheerfully. “We’re done talking about you.”

“I wasn’t eavesdropping!” she yelps, storming the rest of the way down the stairs to glare at them both, and effectually blowing her shot at stealthiness all to hell. “You guys were just talking really loud!”

“Of course we were,” Artie deadpans; the look on his face isn’t quite a smile, but it’s close enough that Claudia can safely guess she’s not in real trouble. He forces a scowl, then folds his arms. “Don’t you have more destructive things to be doing with your time, anyway?” he demands. “Pillaging record stores? Vandalising local businesses with so-called ‘street art’? You know, ‘young person’ things?”

Claudia quirks a brow, and Leena makes a sound that’s surrealistically close to a giggle. “Apparently, in the world of Artie, you’re the misunderstood delinquent protagonist of a Matt Damon movie...” she remarks.

For about half a second, Claudia almost laughs, but then she remembers that she’s still mad at Leena for kicking her out of her one safe place in the middle of the night, so she just glares and pouts instead.

“I’m still not talking to you,” she announces loudly, and she can practically feel the lightness in the room flicker and fizzle out into nonexistence as she stalks away.

\--- 

“Claudia.”

Irritated, she spins on her heels; the motion is almost grateful, and if she wasn’t so pissed off right now, she’d probably be ten kinds of pleased with herself for not falling the hell over. “What part of ‘I’m not talking to you’ are you having trouble with?”

“The part where you’re not talking to me,” Leena answers simply, not missing a beat, like that’s reason enough to chase her down like this. “Claudia, we need to talk about this...”

“No, we don’t.” Already, she can feel her voice getting pitchy, tremulous and whimpery even as she struggles to cling to her trademark anger instead. “It’s pretty clear from where I’m standing, Leena. I get it, okay? So you can just—”

“No, you don’t ‘get it’,” Leena interrupts, quietly challenging. “Claudia...”

“Leave me alone!” The outburst is not exactly mature, but this isn’t about making a point any more (if it ever was in the first place). She really, really doesn’t want to break down in front of Leena; she can’t let this woman – this infuriating, frustrating woman that she needs so desperately – see just how much she’s hurt her. So she has to end this, now. “You made it real clear, Leena, laid it right the hell out for me. I’m a loose cannon, and you don’t want anything to do with me. And that’s just... hey, that’s just _peachy_ , y’know... ’cause, right now, I don’t want anything to do with you either.”

“I never said I don’t want anything to do with you,” Leena insists gently. “And you’re not a loose cannon. I promise you, Claudia, it’s not about that. I’m just not sure that—”

“You just don’t want me to stay with you any more,” Claudia finishes for her, cutting her off with a wave that slashes crudely through the air with all of the violence that she can’t let out in other ways. “Because you, what, you don’t feel safe around me any more? Is that it? ’Cause I swear, Leena... I _swear_... you’re about the only thing that’s keeping me from jumping off the deep end right now, and if you’re scared of me too, I don’t...”

She trails off, sharp and keening. She has no freakin’ idea where all this stuff is coming from, but it’s out there now, hanging on the air between them like a rope ready to hang her, and she can’t take it back.

“I’m not scared of you, Claudia,” Leena says, and, though she’s not raised her voice once, there’s an intensity in it now that makes it really, really difficult to not believe her.

“Then what? Why won’t you let me stay with you? Why won’t you tell me I’m not gonna lose it like HG did? Dammit, Leena, you got skills! You know stuff. If you tell me I’m gonna be okay, you gotta know I’ll believe you. You know I will. So why... why won’t you just do that?” She’s panting, hoarse and ragged, but she presses on because she needs to get this out. “And on top of that – _on top of that_! – why’d you have to go and take away the one place I don’t feel like I gotta be scared of myself?” And now she’s just flat-out begging, but she’s too wounded to care. “What’d I do that’s so awful you had to take that away from me?”

“Claudia...”

“You know!” Claudia cries again, and that really is the crux of all this. “You know how much it took for me to come to you. You know how hard it was.”

“I do,” Leena replies. “I do know. And I promise you, Claudia, I don’t want to hurt you. If you can’t believe anything else, at least believe that.” She sighs; she looks completely and utterly drained, but her eyes are still bright. “But you’re looking for a kind of comfort that I can’t give you, and that has to stop.”

“What are you even talking about?” Claudia snaps. “You were doing great! You were doing awesome. You think I’d be this pissed if you weren’t giving me what I need?”

Leena groans. She looks really, genuinely exasperated, like Claudia is deliberately refusing to comprehend something that is really blindingly simple. It’s probably not that dissimilar, actually, to the expression that Claudia gets on her own face when she’s trying to teach Artie how to break through a firewall.

“Claudia, I’m sorry. I’m really sorry, but you...” She closes her eyes; it’s obvious that she is choosing her next words with great care, and Claudia’s chest tightens suddenly with a very different kind of fear. “It’s not _appropriate_ , Claudia.”

That’s pretty much the last word in the universe that Claudia would have expected her to use about this scenario, and she feels a frown of genuine, honest befuddlement crease her brow. It’s always a challenge for her to admit that she doesn’t understand something straight away, her mind being what it is, but this has her so completely thrown that there’s no escaping the confession.

“I don’t get it...” she complains. “It was okay before, right? So what changed?”

Leena studies her, long and hard, and takes a deep breath. It looks kind of like she’s trying to steady herself, but that’s ridiculous because she’s still Leena, and she is always steady. Even when she’s not, somehow she still is. And yet, that seems to be exactly what she’s doing here, because she’s bracing herself against the wall with one hand, and her fingers are twitching against the solid surface, whipcord tense as she looks Claudia right in the eye.

“You did,” she says, very quietly. “You just don’t realise it yet.”

\--- 

With well-voiced reluctance, Artie actually does take Leena’s advice.

He still refuses to let Claudia out for about 75% of the missions that he makes Pete take on by himself, and he’s pretty flagrantly deliberate in picking stuff that’s at least mostly straightforward for her to tag along on... but it’s still real, proper, actual agent-style field work, and it keeps her mind distracted from less pleasant things, and so she doesn’t whine about it.

Pete seems mostly glad of the company, now that they’re not chasing down stuff that holds nostalgic angst for them both. He’s still not quite back to his usual self, but he’s getting a little bit closer to it, and, for all that she’s still in pain too, Claudia has always been pretty good at bringing out the best in him when it really matters.

( _Not as good as Myka, though..._ her mind comments unhelpfully, and she wishes that she could punch it right in its prefrontal lobe.)

They’re kind of good for each other, in fact, because he’s not so bad himself when it comes to getting a smile out of her, even when she’s feeling like crap. And maybe Leena wasn’t just talking about getting Claudia into a place where she couldn’t marinade in her anger; maybe she was talking about this as much as anything else, about her and Pete just being themselves, because there’s a peculiar kind of catharsis that comes with reconnecting with the big-bro she’s been so distant from lately.

And, yeah. She won’t lie – sitting with him in yet another crappy-ass run-down hellhole of a diner, and rolling her eyes as he wolfs down a whole entire stack of pancakes? It’s as close to normal as she’s felt in a long time.

\--- 

“I called her, y’know.”

Pete barely glances up from his fourth pancake. “Who?” he grunts through a mouth full of syrup.

Claudia sighs. “Myka.” She turns her face away, ashamed. “I called her.”

She’s not quite sure what’s brought out the confession in her right at this moment (though she is very, very sure that it’s probably the last thing Pete wants to hear ever), but, like with so much of the emotional stupidity she’s been spilling lately, the words are out there before she has a chance to think about what a dumb idea it is to voice them.

Pete’s face falls; he looks kind of like she’s just run over his puppy and then sent him a bill for all the damage it caused to the car.

“What the hell did you do that for?” he demands, and he’s trying so hard to be all big and tough and discipline-y, but it’s really not fooling either one of them.

“I dunno,” Claudia confesses softly, embarrassed. “I just missed her, dude. We were chasing that HG-but-not-actually-HG thing, and I just... I dunno. I just really, really missed her.”

Maybe, if he was someone else, Pete would have said something about that, thrown out a token _‘I miss her too’_ or something, let her know she’s not alone in feeling like she does. But, nope. He’s Pete, and he doesn’t do moments like this; and besides, his mind is clearly running at something like two million miles an hour, trying catch up with what he’s hearing, still fixated on the fact that she did something so stupid as to call the ex-teammate who abandoned them both. He doesn’t care at all why she did it, she realises. He just cares that she _did_.

“What’d she say?” he asks, and she can tell he’s asking for a reason, not just out of morbid curiosity. She wonders if he’s tried it himself, if he’s called a thousand times already and is wondering if Myka might have actually deigned to pick up if it was Claudia calling instead of him. Or maybe he’s not tried it at all; maybe he’s too much of a coward, or too stubborn, or just too _Pete_ , and now he wants to live vicariously through Claudia’s weakness, to hear Myka’s voice through the one of them who isn’t so scared or stubborn or Pete-ish.

Whatever the reason, he looks so sad that a lump rises up in her throat, and she rushes to reassure him, to make him realise that it’s not like she had a whole long conversation with Myka or anything, that he isn’t missing out on anything by not calling her, or by not getting her to pick up, or any of the hundred other things he looks like he might be worrying about.

“Voicemail,” she says hastily. “It went to voicemail.”

He doesn’t relax, not even a tiny bit. “Man, tell me you weren’t dumb enough to leave a message...”

“Of course not!” she squeaks automatically, then immediately gives up, because she’s the worst liar in the history of all liars in the known universe. “Well, uhm... that is... y’know, maybe there was a teeny tiny little... like, it doesn’t even really count as a message at all, it was so—”

“Claud!”

“I’m sorry!” she yelps. “I know it was stupid. I don’t even know what I was thinking. I mean, it’s not like she doesn’t know where we are, right? She could totally... I mean... like, if she wanted to... it’s not like she couldn’t...”

She trails off weakly, coughing on something that she’ll swear to the grave is dust. Pete pushes away the rest of his pancakes, and that action alone says so much more than any words ever could. “Claud.”

And then, suddenly, his hand is resting on top of hers, and she realises that she should be taking comfort in the contact, that this is exactly the kind of shared grief she’s been clinging to so much lately – they’re both in the same place, both hurting in the same way and thinking about the same thing, both missing Myka in pretty much the same way, both feeling the same stuff in the same moment in the same way. It should be everything she needs, everything she wants; it should be just like that moment when she was playing chess with Leena, and this happened then. It should put a balm over the open would that Leena carved into her when she took herself away... but it doesn’t.

In essence, it’s exactly the same. The same connection, the same unspoken empathy – neither of them really talking about it, but both drawing a kind of strength from knowing that they’re both feeling it together. It’s exactly the same as it was with Leena, but Claudia still feels just as cold and lonely and lost now as she did before, even with the gentle press of Pete’s hand, the contact that is so similar but still so unfathomably far from what she wants.

It feels the same, but it’s not... and she cannot understand why.

\--- 

It pretty much goes without saying that they don’t mention Myka and her voicemail ever again.

Pete is doing his usual thing, burying his head in the ground and pretending that it never even happened in the first place (he’s been spending too much time with Artie, apparently, and picked up on his denial-wrought self-preservation techniques), and Claudia’s not really inclined to bring the subject up again herself when it was such a monumental catastrophe.

Now that it’s out there, though, thoughts of it linger... and with them, questions.

Did Myka even listen to the message at all, or just erase it as soon as she figured out who it was from, not wanting to risk hearing anything that might remind her of the Warehouse? If she did listen to it, what did she think? Was she judging her, rolling her eyes and feeling all the more relieved that she’s left that world – the arrogant little punk-ass kid – far behind her? Or was she maybe thinking the same stuff, missing Claudia too, even just a tiny little bit, maybe even hoping for another spur-of-the-moment voicemail somewhere down the line, a reminder of the home that still has a place for her if only she can bring herself to come back?

Weirdly, she finds that both options are about as painful as each other. It hurts just as much to think that Myka might be hurting too as it does to assume that she’s just consciously ignoring her.

She shunts the whole screwed-up mess to the back of her mind. Or, well, tries to. Tries not to let herself think about it too much (or at all, if she can manage that), gets her head back in the game. It’s a good plan, and being out in the field helps massively, what with the whole ‘having more important stuff to focus on right now’ dealio, but it’s not a permanent thing, and she’d be an idiot to expect that it is.

Because, of course, once she’s back home, in her bed at the B&B, staring up at the obnoxious ceiling and unable to sleep at four-oh-three because Leena won’t let her share her bed for some stupid reason that she won’t even freakin’ give, it’s kind of impossible to keep her mind from wandering.

Everything is so much more complicated without Myka around. And it’s not even just that Claudia’s missing her physical presence any more; she misses absolutely everything about her being there.

She misses the way that Myka would deal with Pete, the way he’d handle her in return, the way that they would play against each other in perfect tune, rhythm and bass, like they were born to bounce off each other like that. Claudia loves Pete, a whole lot, but she’s young and he kind of isn’t (for all that he acts like he is), and she just can’t get through to him in the way that Myka used to. They don’t have the same experiences, and Claudia is very, very aware of all the corners of Real Life that she’s not yet turned.

More even than that, though, it was easier for her and Pete to be themselves, too, when Myka was around; they could be as loud or obnoxious or immature as they wanted to be, and it was always okay because Myka was always there to make them rein it in if they took it too far. Which, yeah, was often (and usually awesome).

Without her, though, it’s just them. Just the two of them, both hopeless and clueless and useless. Neither of them really have any idea where that line is, how far is ‘too far’... and so, by a kind of silent agreement, they just kind of stay as far away as possible from any place that it might be, afraid of crossing it without meaning to. Because, yeah, it is so much easier to avoid this stuff completely than try to figure it out for themselves when Myka isn’t there to point them in the right direction.

And it’s the same with Artie, too. He’s always been a cranky old geezer (probably even way back in the Stone Age when he was still in diapers), and Claudia knows that better than most... but then, Myka could also be kind of cranky and geezerish too, when she wanted to be (like when something was shelved half an inch in the wrong direction or something), and somehow her geezerishness and Artie’s always managed to (at least mostly) offset each other, their natural like-minded polarity balancing each other out in a way that neither Claudia nor Pete will ever be able to duplicate.

Ii’s like a circuit, their little dysfunctional almost-family unit. It’s _exactly_ like a circuit, in fact... only it’s suddenly missing one of its components, and the parts that are left can try and try and try to keep things going, but the circuit is never ever going to work properly until that lost piece is back where it needs to be.

\--- 

With no Myka, and now no Leena either, the nights are even darker and colder than they were before, all the more lonely for the lingering taste of what it was to have them not feel that way.

It’s natural, she supposes; the hole in her heart has taken on a new shape now, the flickering colours of Myka’s night-light, the rustle of turning pages, the mnemonic senses at the edge of her mind are all forging themselves now into something even more painful, reshaped by phantom memories of Leena’s body, her arms, the rhythm of her breathing.

She feels guilty, thinking of Leena in the same heartbeat as she thinks of Myka, when at least Leena is still _here_ , but she can’t help it. The sense of loss is still the same, and her body aches to think of those arms, just as deeply as her heart aches to remember Myka’s night-light.

The whole thing is enough to drive anyone to madness, even someone not already disposed to it. But, of course, madness is a place that Claudia has been in too many times before, too many to ever let herself go back without a fight. And she may be broken, but she’s still breathing, and while she’s got breath in her, she won’t let the straitjackets take her again. She won’t.

So she’ll deal with this thing by herself (because she has nobody else any more), or she’ll sure as hell die trying. And she doesn’t even really care any more which option turns out to be her endgame right now, because, whichever it is, she won’t end up back _there_.

If she’s going to end up anywhere, she decides, it’ll sure as hell be her choice where.

The thing is, though, she’s only got one place left. There’s only one option that hasn’t let her down already, only one bridge that hasn’t already burned down beneath her feet, only one sanctuary that hasn’t run away or kicked her out or abandoned her. There’s only one place left in all the world that she can depend on to keep her safe from her thoughts until the sun comes up.

It’s four-oh-three, and she’s going to the Warehouse.

\--- 

Even Artie’s asleep at this time of night (she can hear him snoring from about eight aisles down), so she’s basically got the whole place to herself.

To her own surprise, she doesn’t go to the HG Wells section. It’s her first impulse, sure, a reflex that comes as clean and sure as cussing at a stubbed toe, but she doesn’t do it. For all the self-indulgent angst that it promises, there’s just too much other stuff here, too many exciting things that she’s not usually allowed to play with. The Warehouse never sleeps, and she can feel it humming with potential as she wanders its labyrinthine corridors, aimless but intent.

She’s going to fix things, she decides. If she can’t fix herself, can’t eradicate the demons from her head, can’t repair the screwed-up, broken-down, damaged circuit that their lives have become, then she’s just going to have to settle for fixing what little things she can.

In a weird sort of way, it makes her sad. For sure, it makes her think of HG (there’s no way to avoid that), of her genius, her section, the mark that her beautiful mind has left on this place, this world that is their lives. More, though, it makes her think about the time they’d spent here together – she and HG, just them – when Myka was busy or chasing artefacts with Pete or whatever, those rare and precious fragments of time, a few minutes or a few hours or a day, where Claudia would get HG all to herself.

They would lose themselves for hours on end, swimming in shared enthusiasm, bouncing brainwaves and ideas and imaginings and just delighting in their mutual reciprocal technogeekery. If HG had stayed, if she hadn’t turned out to be evil, Claudia knows all too well that the two of them could have wrought all kinds of havoc on the Warehouse together. They could have rained down chaos the likes that even Mrs Frederic had never seen before, pretty much until the end of time. Just the thought of it... the two of them unapologetically taunting Artie (and anyone else within a hundred miles) until he’d throw his hands up, exasperated with them both, and just leave them to get on with it... good God, it would have been beyond epic.

Except that, yeah, HG kind of _is_ evil, which means that Claudia can think about this stuff all she wants, but it’s never, ever, ever going to happen. So she can either wallow in it, let the memory of HG tear apart the one place that hasn’t already been taken from her, give up on the Warehouse just like Myka and Leena have already given up on her... or she can break through all of that and be the biggest techno-badass this side of the Victorian era all by herself. HG may have screwed her, betrayed her, tore out her heart and tore away her big sister, but Claudia’s still got an arsenal for her own kind of payback.

When she’s done with this place, she decides, HG frackin’ Wells will be wishing that she’d stayed on the light side, just so she could be a witness to it.

\--- 

There’s no shortage of junk in the Warehouse that needs repairing, altering, or upgrading, so Claudia makes herself at home.

She makes a start by working on the security systems (which, sorry Artie, could always benefit from a little Claudiautonomy), and installs a bunch of shiny new custom firewalls that the old geezer would most definitely not approve of (but, yeah, what he doesn’t know won’t hurt him... and besides, she’s pretty sure he would have tried to veto the ideas of ‘fire’ and ‘the wheel’ if only he hadn’t been taking a nap during that particular meeting of the Caveman’s Club), and then cheerfully moves on.

It’s little stuff, mostly, stuff she knows that Artie won’t ever notice, even if he was actively looking for it. At least, that’s how it starts out, anyway – little tweaks and hotfixes here and there and pretty much everywhere – but she’s never been the kind of girl to satisfy herself with little stuff for more than five minutes before getting bored, and, of course, by the time morning rolls around (marked by the sound of grumbling and complaining from wherever the hell Artie’s surfaced from), she’s inevitably progressed a little. Or, well, possibly a lot.

By the time he finds her, a couple of hours after she first hears him stomping about, she’s lying sprawled on her stomach in the middle of a disused aisle, with the Tesla schematics all spread out in front of her, and is happily working out a whole new system layout inside her head.

“What are you _doing_?!” he screeches, like she’s just set the place on fire or something.

“Nothin’, gramps, jeez!” she yelps, bouncing defensively to her feet. “I swear I was just reading ’em! Don’t get your panties in a bunch.”

He’s still glaring, though, like he knows she’s spinning bull, so she rolls the schematics back up and hands them over, putting on the most innocent-looking pout that she can muster.

“Claudia,” he mutters, like he’s somehow immune to her epic Level 85 charisma, “what have we said about tampering with perfection?”

“Oh, come on, dude!” she whines. “Those things are so not ‘perfection’! Gimme ten minutes and a ball of yarn, _then_ they’ll be perfection.”

“Claudia...” he warns again, and she sighs in bitter, petulant defeat. He grunts an acknowledgement of her unspoken white flag and generously refrains from berating her any further. “Shouldn’t you still be over at Leena’s anyway? Surely it’s far too early for you to actually be doing your job...”

And, yeah, of course he just had to friggin’ go there, didn’t he? “No,” she grunts, looking everywhere but at him. “I’m here instead.”

He must have sensed the evasiveness in her, aware that something’s not right, because he’s softening a little, squeezing himself with obvious effort into that much-despised role of ‘father figure’ that she loves and hates so very much.

“Claudia...?”

It’s an entirely different tone now, and if he were anyone else it would have sounded almost kind of compassionate. Given that it’s Artie, of course, it’s still pretty far from the mark, but she gets it and appreciates the effort just the same. He’s looking at her like he really cares how she feels, like he really honestly wants to know what’s bothering her, and she kind of gets the feeling that she’s doomed before the conversation has even started.

“Look, Artie...” she starts, trying to pre-empt it. “You don’t have to, like, worry or anything. It’s not, like, a _thing_. I just couldn’t sleep, so I figured I’d come out here and make myself useful instead of staring at the ceiling and missing— uh, not doing anything.” She rolls her eyes at him, exaggeratedly snarky, and rushes on. “It’s called ‘taking initiative’, dude. Look it up.”

He’s still studying her, though, and she can tell that he’s seeing right through the breezy attitude. He doesn’t get insightful very often (or pretty much ever), so when he does actually pay attention and notice stuff, it’s always a guaranteed killer. She is so definitely doomed.

“Why couldn’t you sleep?” he asks gently, like there always has to be a reason for everything. Like she can’t possibly have just been having an off-night or feeling skittish or restless or whatever. Like it’s a whole big freaking issue.

“Just couldn’t,” she mutters, and hopes that he’ll just leave it at that.

He sighs. Of course he won’t. “Claudia, Myka’s been gone for a while now. We all have to move on.”

“She’s coming back,” she blurts out, and wonders where the hell that even came from. It’s not like she even believes it, or has ever caught herself thinking it, even in delusive hope... and yet, there it is, right out there, the words like bittersweet poison on her tongue.

Artie’s staring at her now, and she can’t exactly blame him for the expression on her face; he suddenly looks like he’s feeling very sorry for her, like he wants to take her pain away, even take it into himself if it’d make her feel less. It’s almost kind of touching... at least, until he opens up his mouth again and blows the whole thing right to hell.

“Claudia, not everybody who leaves comes back.”

She recoils, suddenly really angry. Furious, even. It’s not fair for him to play that card, and he damn sure knows it. “I know that, Artie,” she grits out, forceful, and the look on his face is enough to make her want to stick to this frivolous stupid point that she didn’t even really believe in the first place, just to prove his self-righteousness wrong. “But Myka will. You’ll see.”

Seeming to know better than to try and fight her when she’s already made up her mind about something, he backs down, switching creakily to another tactic. “So, if it’s not Myka,” he presses cautiously, “why couldn’t you sleep?”

Her mind flashes unbidden to Leena, her bed and her arms and her warmth, and she sucks in a shuddering breath. “I told you, dude. It’s nothing. Just feelin’ restless.”

It’s pretty obvious that he’s not buying it, but he knows her well enough by now to know that she’s not going to give him a straight answer no matter how hard he pushes for one (and, no doubt, that the harder he pushes, the less inclined she’ll be to offer any answer at all). Apparently he has better things to do with his time than wheedle her anyway, because he folds his arms after that, and adopts a characteristic air of every-second-is-vital impatience.

“I’m not going to let you out in the field if you’re not sleeping properly,” he informs her candidly, and she whines out a sulky little _“unfair!”_. Clearly, he’s just being obnoxious about this now. “You need to have a clear head out there, and spending all hours of the night rewiring things that worked perfectly well to begin with is not conducive to clear-headedness in the field.”

“Oh, but, Artie—”

“That’s final, young lady!” Off her disbelief – did he really just ‘young lady’ her? Like, seriously? – he softens again, albeit not by very much. “But... all right, look... if you really, absolutely, positively must insist on playing with things in the middle of the night...”

She brightens. This is all kinds of unexpected, and (for once) in the good way. “Yeah?”

The look on his face can only be described as absolute disgust as he shoves a hastily-scribbled scrap of paper at her. “ _This_ is what it’s acceptable for you to play with,” he grumps, and she’s really forty-two flavours of touched that he’s apparently given enough thought to this scenario to actually keep a list on hand. “Deviate at your own peril.”

For a moment or two, she thinks about thanking him, because this is really an awesome thing for him to do, a display of faith and confidence that he can’t possibly think he won’t see. He’s telling her that he trusts her to mess with stuff, and it doesn’t even matter that it’s only a very specific list of stuff that is probably stupidly simple and stuff he could fix himself, because the fact is that he trusts her with it. He’s giving her permission to do this stuff, and to do it without supervision, and it’s kind of a big deal.

But, of course, he’s Artie, and if she voices any of that aloud, she knows he’ll take it all back with a grumbling _“well, if you’re going to be like that about it...”_ , and a potent scowl. So, instead, she just snaps off a hasty, grateful salute, and tries not to beam too bright.

“Yes sir, Captain Grouchypants, sir!”

He rolls his eyes and turns to walk away. Claudia watches him for about half a second, then lurches after him. For all of her warnings to herself, all those her insistences that she need to play this cool and not let it become a moment, something in the way he walks off compels her to go after him, and she can’t quite keep herself from attacking him from behind and hugging his cranky prehistoric brains out.

“Thanks, geezer.”

He extricates himself with obvious effort and even more obvious horror, and offers up his best _‘no hugging, under any circumstances, ever’_ scowl. “Just don’t make me regret it.”

\--- 

It’s a challenge, if ever she’s heard one, and of course she’s back to working on the Tesla plans that night.

The whole thing is twice as satisfying now, she finds. On the one hand, she’s finally working on something that’s an actual challenge, something geared to exactly her brain wheels, something to really get her adrenaline going,... and, as if that wasn’t reason enough to get psyched about it, now she’s doing it in direct defiance of Artie’s orders. It’s doubly sweet.

It is, after all, a pretty big leap from doing something that she knows he’d disapprove of _if he ever finds out about it_ , to doing something that he’s already actively disapproved of, and she takes quite a criminal amount of joy in picturing his face when he finds out that, firstly, she’s disobeyed him (again), and, secondly, that by so doing, she’s improved his so-called ‘perfection’ by at least 275%.

It’s real joy, too. Like real, actual joy, and holy crap she’d forgotten what that feels like.

Obviously, she fits the Tesla project in amongst a bunch of other things, some big and some little. Admittedly, it’s in no small part with the intent of throwing Artie off the scent (she knows him well enough to realise that he’ll be suspicious if he knows she’s been working all these hours without showing anything off)... but honestly, it’s mostly just because she really, really wants to stretch this thing out.

It’s fun. It’s really and truly _fun_. And heaven only knows, she could use some of that right now.

\--- 

Some time during her third session, she falls asleep.

She’d literally only put her head down for a second or two, let her eyes drift shut for a moment in the hopes that it would clear away some of the late-night blurriness that’s started to creep in. That’s all she did... but apparently it’s been so freaking long since she’s had any kind of sleep at all that that’s all it takes. Just a half-second, and she’s out.

And not just out, but out cold, completely and utterly dead to the world. Barely a heartbeat after she’s closed her eyes, she’s gone, and she stays that way until the morning.

\--- 

Of course, she dreams about Myka.

They’re in her room at the B&B, and of course it’s the middle of the night, and of course they’re both bathed in the warm orange glow of Myka’s night-light, and of course it’s just like the countless nights before that have played out exactly like this one is.

It’s the most obvious dream setting in the history of dream settings, but it’s so exact, so completely like she remembers it that Claudia doesn’t even care how unoriginal her subconscious is. Because she’s _here_ , she’s really here, and so is Myka, and who even cares if it’s just a stupid dream anyway?

“You look good,” Myka tells her. She’s smiling fondly over a first-edition copy of _The War Of The Worlds_ , and Claudia’s heart stops at the sight of it.

“Thanks,” she mumbles absently, distracted by the pain in her chest. “And, y’know... you too.”

They settle, then, into their usual amicable silence, and Claudia is mostly content to just drink deep of this moment that she never thought she’d see again, the shuffling of bedcovers and the rustle of turning pages, the beautiful glow of that goddamned night-light. She wraps herself up in blankets that aren’t too soft, and bathes in how unspeakably amazing it is that she’s even here at all, even if it is just for a fleeting imaginary moment. Basks in the memory of just being here with Myka, like they used to be, back when everything was simple, and the only thing that kept her from sleep were visions of straitjackets and her brother’s empty grave.

It’s so blissfully close to perfect, so excruciatingly close, until—

“You know this isn’t where you really want to be, Claud, right?”

Claudia blinks, dazed and unfocused. “Huh?”

“Here.” Myka gestures, taking in the whole room in a single graceful sweep. “It’s not where you want to be any more. It’s not where your heart is.”

“It’s exactly where I want to be!” Claudia protests, too loud and too fervent, and she knows it’s true but somehow she’s not even convincing herself, much less the woman she’s actually trying to convince. “It’s so totally where my heart is! God, Myka, I’ve missed you so freakin’ much, you have no idea—”

“I know you have,” Myka interrupts, and her too-low tone is a frightening counterpoint to Claudia’s exaggerated volume, reverberating futilely off the walls. “And I’ve missed you too. You know that. But I’ve been gone for a while now, and you... you’re different, Claud. You’ve _changed_.”

The accusation resonates, a pure note struck with precision (because Myka always does everything with precision), and it takes Claudia a moment to realise why it sounds so familiar. The memory isn’t a pleasant one, and she squares up her shoulders, hyper-defensive by reflex.

“That’s what Leena said,” she growls. “That’s why she won’t let me—” She cuts herself off quickly, refusing to let her mind – or Myka’s – go there. “But, hey, c’mon, Myka. We both know she doesn’t know what she’s talking about, right?”

Myka looks right through her, like she’s talking to a ghost. “Sometimes people surprise you.”

Claudia twitches at that, and she doesn’t really know why. “I wanna be here,” she says again, trying not to focus on all the things swirling around her, the shadows of reality trying to take away what is supposed to be her perfect haven. “I want to be here, with you and your books and your stupid little night-light and your covers that aren’t too soft and the way we don’t talk and just... I wanna be _here_ , Myka. I want to be right here. There’s no other place I want to be. There’s no other—”

“There is, though,” Myka points out softly, then sighs when Claudia opens her mouth to argue yet again. “Oh, Claud, it’s all right. It doesn’t make any of this any less important.” She sighs again, a shimmering echo of her last. “I’m gone, Claud. I’m gone, and you’re allowed to move on.” She leans across the bed, catching Claudia’s hand in a rare moment of actual physical contact. “It doesn’t mean that you miss me less, just because you’ve found another place to hide when you get scared.” Her eyes are sparkling, but there’s something odd in them, more shadows swirling beneath their depth. “I’m glad you have.”

“I haven’t...” Claudia argues weakly. “I don’t...”

She can’t make words, though, and so she just trails pathetically off. Myka watches her, that same fond smile still lifting the corners of her lips; behind it, though, Claudia can see that she’s tired and drawn. 

She has to get them off this, she decides. Myka isn’t allowed to think that she has somewhere else, not when she doesn’t. And it’s true, whatever Myka may want to think – she _doesn’t_. Leena made sure of that, didn’t she? She made damn sure that there’s no other place for Claudia to hide, that the only place she has left is the stupid Warehouse. Isn’t that why she’s flat-out on its dusty floor right now?

So, yeah, she has to take them away from this. Has to draw them back to what’s important, because trying to convince Myka that there’s nothing left for her outside of this memory is just too painful. It hurts to think of it, to think of Leena, almost more than it hurts to think that she might soon wake up and lose this moment with Myka as well.

“Did you get my message?” she blurts out in a moment of not-even-close-to inspiration; her voice rises hopefully, and part of her knows that it’s a ridiculous question to ask a phantasm, but it’s the closest she’s ever going to get to asking the real Myka, and it’s as much of an ice-breaker as anything else she can think of, and so she runs with it.

It’s a no-go, though, and Myka sighs. “Claud...”

“I know,” she whines. She’s feeling young and small all of a sudden; nothing is working like it should, and she can’t understand why. This is the one place where everything is supposed to be perfect, so why is it all falling apart? Why isn’t it like she remembers it? “I know,” she repeats, moody. “It’s ‘complicated’. ’Cause, yeah, everything is so freakin’ complicated, isn’t it? You’re complicated and Leena’s complicated and the whole frackin’ world is complicated.” She sits upright, suddenly filled with urgency. “But it doesn’t have to be, Myka! We’re your friends. Hell, we’re your family. Come back to us. Come _home_.”

Myka shakes her head, sadness tainting the smile. “You know I can’t, Claud.”

“Aw, c’mon, Myka. I got a bet goin’ with Artie now, and everything. You don’t wanna let him win, do you?”

Myka laughs, but it’s definitely bordering on sorrow now; Claudia can see the cracks spreading out from the edges of her perfect sanctuary, growing ever wider and more threatening, and she hates them.

“You’re doing fine without me,” Myka tells her. “You can handle Pete, right?”

“Sure,” Claudia replies, and instantly wishes she could take it back because it sounds so much like acceptance. “But—”

“You’ll be fine, Claud,” Myka insists before she can say anything, and she sounds so unwaveringly certain, like her faith is so unshakeably strong, that Claudia almost believes her.

And then, out of the blue, there’s hugging. She’s really not at all sure which of them started it, but there it is and it’s happening and she couldn’t fight it even if she wanted to.

Myka’s body feels strange against hers, though, unfamiliar even though they’ve hugged before and it’s always felt just like this. She’s not so curved as Claudia was expecting, and everything’s shaped differently and in different places. She’s all solid muscle and sinew, and it’s definitely Myka, but it just doesn’t feel right. Her arms are too long, her embrace too tight, and everything that should bring her comfort right now is having exactly the opposite effect.

So maybe there really is some truth in what she was saying before, even if it doesn’t make any kind of sense, because, even though it’s them and they’re here and they’re hugging and it’s everything that it should be, even though everything is what it’s always been, all the things she’s missed so badly, suddenly it’s not what Claudia wants at all. 

The confusion must be obvious on her face or something, because there’s a sad kind of sympathy in Myka’s shadow-touched eyes when she breaks the contact and leans back.

“You have changed,” she says again. It’s softer this time, almost awestruck, and Claudia feels the ghost of something ominous pressing against the edge of her mind.

“How?” she demands; for all the unease it brings, the accusation is starting to get kind of annoying now, what with everyone throwing it around and nobody seeming to want to to explain it in terms that she can understand. “In a good way? A bad way? A going-nuts-and-nuking-the-world way? Why won’t anyone tell me?!”

Myka laughs. She tousles her hair just like Pete does, but doesn’t answer the question.

“I’m going to go now,” she says instead, and Claudia feels the instant threat of tears stinging salt-sharp behind her eyes.

“Don’t. Myka, don’t...”

Myka cups her face. “You know I have to, Claud. I can’t stay here forever, and neither can you, even if you want to. Which we both know you don’t, not really.” Claudia opens her mouth to protest, to argue against that, even as her heart concedes that Myka might be right, but Myka cuts her off before she has a chance, with an ambivalent shake of her curls. “Keep taking care of Pete and Artie for me, okay?” She smiles, then, but it’s not at all like her usual smile. “And tell Leena I said ‘hi’.”

“I don’t—” Claudia starts.

But Myka is already gone, and the room is already starting to fade out into noiseless grey, and she knows it’s too late.

\--- 

The dream lingers at the back of her mind, ghostly and illusory, like a shadow flickering in and out of her field of vision just often enough to be annoying, but never quite vivid enough to catch and brush aside. She tries to shake it away, like cobwebs hanging loose and heavy over her, but it sticks fast to her troubled thoughts and refuses to be dislodged.

Like all the other demons in her head, she supposes, she’s stuck with it.

When she’s recovered herself enough to walk around without stumbling into things, she heads back to the B&B, albeit with an unexpected (and unwanted) reluctance. She wouldn’t be going back there at all, as a matter of fact, only she kind of desperately needs a shower and a change of clothes; she’s been flat-out – both figuratively and literally – for hours on end, and it’s started to take its toll on her body. Her neck’s all stiff and sore and her muscles ache right down to the bone.

It’s a good ache, the empowering muscle pain of hard work done well, and she’s pretty damn proud of it... but holy mother of God, is she ever gonna punch the hell out of something if she doesn’t get a long hot shower right the hell now.

She tries to sneak past the kitchen as noiselessly as she can, but of course it’s a futile endeavour. It’s like an elephant trying to sneak past... well, pretty much anything in the known universe, really. And, of course, Leena is innately more observant than the average dumbass in the first place, even without the added bonus of Claudia’s inherent inability to be sneaky.

Naturally, then, the woman is onto her in about point-three of a second. “Claudia? Is that you?”

“Not hungry!” she calls back, hoping to pre-empt the ever-present breakfast debate.

She keeps right on moving, deliberate and purposeful, and refuses to break stride. If she stops, or even slows down, for so much as a heartbeat, she’ll be caught like a gazelle by a... well, by another absurd wildlife metaphor, probably. And she’s not going to let that happen. She’s gonna take a shower, throw some clothes on, and run the hell back to the Warehouse before Leena has a chance to catch her. She’ll be as smart and quick as the freakin’ roadrunner, goddammit, and Leena won’t stand a chance.

“Don’t need breakfast,” she goes on, still moving. “Gonna go take a shower now. See you later.” Then, because apparently she’s losing her mind completely (assuming it’s not already long gone by now), “Oh, and Myka says ‘hi’.”

That pretty much clinches it. Leena comes tearing out of the kitchen, a spatula in one hand and a carton of milk in the other, and Claudia really wishes she’d had the foresight to pack a box of Acme Anvils before coming back here.

“ _What_?!?” Leena yelps.

Claudia flushes neon. “Uhm...”

Okay, so, yeah. This is kind of awkward... and, to be perfectly honest, it’s about a hundred times more so than it even should be, because Claudia is still pretty much refusing to stop moving, even though she’s been pretty well caught by now, and she’s kind of trying explain and run to the stairs at the same time, and it’s just really not working on any level at all. She’s mostly just working herself into even more of a mess than she was already in... and, given her state right now, that’s really saying something.

“...y’know what?” she babbles, worse than useless. “It’s nothing, I said nothing, I didn’t say anything, so I’m gonna go shower now, okay, cool, see ya, bye.”

It’s probably the most pitifully graceless excuse for an exit that any human being has ever made in the history of all things ever, and of course it’s not going to work, even if Leena wasn’t so impossibly flawless. Anyway, the infuriating woman has already closed the space between them, and doesn’t seem willing to just leave it at that. She’s put the milk somewhere (but kept the spatula for some absurd reason; Claudia’s pretty sure she doesn’t know what she’s planning to do with it), and grabs her by the arm, effectively dragging her to a standstill by brute force.

It hurts, but in a way that has absolutely nothing to do with the strength of her grip. “Claudia!”

“Hey!” Claudia yells in retaliation, not the least bit enamoured by the idea of being manhandled by the very woman who refused to even share the same space with her until about six seconds ago. “Lay off, will ya? Let me go!”

Leena ignores her. Of course she does; she always freakin’ does. At least this time, Claudia supposes, she kind of has a reason. “You talked to Myka?”

“No!” she squeaks defensively. Then, because lying has never really been her strong point, even when she’s not having to deal with Leena’s aura-reading stare (to say nothing of the pain of seeing her standing there in the first place), “Well, uh, I guess, sort of. Maybe. I dunno. Do voicemail messages and hallucinatory ghost-Mykas count?”

Yep. This officially cannot get more awkward.

“Uh...” Leena manages; she clears her throat, slow and cautious and very, very careful, and the look on her face is kind of like the token high-heeled blonde in a horror movie – like she’s about to be cannibalised by a psychotic axe-murderer and is kinda sorta extremely conscious of the fact. “I...” She takes a deep breath. “I’m starting to _worry_ about you, Claudia...”

It’s meant in jest, Claudia knows, but she doesn’t take it that way at all. She yanks her arm free with renewed aggression, and glares at her, eyes wild and challenging.

“Yeah, well, you know what, Leena? You don’t get to worry about me any more. You don’t get to do anything with me or about me or around me at all, and you know why? ‘Cause you kicked me out. You kicked me out, Leena, so... so now the Warehouse is my new BFF, and I get better sleep there than I did with you anyway.” That part, she realises, is actually pretty true. “It doesn’t talk in its sleep, and it doesn’t punch me in the head when it rolls over, and it doesn’t complain when I wake it up, and it’s not gonna kick me out when I go knocking on its door when I’ve got no place else to go, and... and...” She’s floundering, gasping for breath, desperate. “...and you know what else it doesn’t do? You know what else, Leena? It doesn’t _hog the freakin’ covers_! So you can take your ‘worry’ and just—”

“Claudia, stop it.” For someone who’s just had to stand there and listen to a diatribe that, even by Claudia’s usual standards of outright inanity, didn’t really make any kind of sense at all, Leena is infuriatingly calm. “Will you listen to yourself?”

“You kicked me out!” Claudia cries again, but this time it’s less rage-wrought and more wounded. “You knew how hard it was for me to come to you, and you knew that I had nowhere else to go, and you knew... you _knew_ , Leena, and you...”

“Claudia.”

She says it so softly, so regretfully, so much feeling shot through in just one word that it actually pulls Claudia up short for a second, stops her mid-flow and leaves her reeling.

It only lasts a moment, of course, but even that's enough to drown what meagre fragment remained of the fury, leaving in its wake nothing but the broken pain and heartache.

“And you know the worst part?” she demands, and it’s not even a tiny bit angry any more, just shaky, her voice trembling right on the rocky precipice of tearful. “The worst... the absolute worst part?” She throws up her hands, utterly defeated. “You won’t even tell me why you did it. You kicked me out when you knew I had no place left to go... and you won’t even tell me _why_.”

Something in Leena breaks. Just cracks right the hell open, and even wrapped up as she is in the suffocating blanket of her own emotions, Claudia can sense it. It’s physical, brutal, a shattering of something intangible deep inside her, but before Claudia has a chance to figure out what it is, or even ask, she finds herself pulled into what is probably the most violent, fiercest hug that she’s ever experienced in her entire life.

Leena’s arms are like cables around her, shaking through with strength and weakness and both at the same time, and it’s so perfect, so _exactly_ what Claudia needs right now that she can’t even breathe for the emotion of it. She really, genuinely can’t breathe, and her lungs are screaming in very real pain, but she wouldn’t trade those arms for all the oxygen in all the world.

And she doesn’t know why it’s hitting her so hard now, why her knees are suddenly buckling beneath her, why those deceptively strong arms are suddenly the only thing keeping her upright, the only thing holding her together, why she suddenly can’t fathom anything more awful than the mere notion of them letting her go... but there’s a voice in the back of her mind that sounds eerily like Myka, telling her over and over again that _this_ is what’s changed...

...and maybe it is. Maybe it really is, because suddenly she’s clinging to every part of Leena she can reach, holding on to her for dear life, like she’s the only thing keeping her alive even as she’s also the one cutting off her breathing... and it’s not because she’s here, because she’s the only one who’s here when nobody else is. It’s not for any of the reasons that made so much sense to begin with – them and only them, and Leena the only one that Claudia can depend on to stay. It’s not about that at all because she can’t depend on her any more. Because she kicked her out. She kicked her out, abandoned her just like Myka did, and that should be enough to make her never want to see her again, much less touch her, but it isn’t. It isn’t, because they’re right here and they are touching and it’s not just close to perfect, it’s _actually_ perfect, really and truly...

...and Claudia is really clinging to her, holding on with every ounce of everything she has within her, and it’s not because Leena’s here, or because her presence is comforting, or because her arms are warm and strong, or because Claudia needs someone to understand her so desperately that it hurts, or for any of those other reasons. It’s because she is who she is, because she’s _Leena_...

...and that, Claudia realises, is the thing that was missing, the thing that has changed in her. That’s the part of her that everyone else could see – that even dream-Myka could see! – but she herself still couldn’t. And it’s ridiculous and it’s stupid and she really should know better than to let it happen, but she can’t breathe and she can’t move and she can’t think, and...

...and then she’s throwing herself upwards, her whole body, aggressive in a completely new way, and her mouth is hot and angry on Leena’s, violent and hurting and desperate in something that’s too brutal to be a kiss but feels so much like one that it sets her on fire... and she doesn’t know what she’s doing, or even really why, only that she doesn’t ever want to stop, and—

Leena pulls back. Her eyes are dark, pupils swollen with something that is definitely not horror, but the hard line of her jaw is saying something else entirely.

“That,” she says in a voice that Claudia doesn’t recognise. “ _That’s_ why.”

\--- 


	4. The Words That Went Wrong

\---

It takes Claudia’s brain a moment to catch up with the rest of her, and, when it does, she supposes it’s only natural that it goes into overdrive.

“Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God—”

The words are hers, she’s sure of that much, but it doesn’t sound like her voice at all. Not that she can actually remember what her voice sounds like; right now, she can barely even remember her own name (it begins with a C, right?), much less anything that actually matters. This, she thinks dumbly, must be what anaphylactic shock feels like.

“—oh my God, oh my God, oh my God.”

Leena is, of course, characteristically erudite. “Uh... Claudia...?”

Not that Claudia is in any condition to listen to her, of course, even if she was giving a whole damn Oscar-winning speech, but that is so not the point right now. One of them really needs to be able to make actual human-sounding words, goddammit, and it’s sure as hell not going to be her.

“That didn’t just happen,” she mumbles hopelessly, because she can’t help but try even when she’s so obviously doomed to fail. “Tell me that didn’t just happen. That did not just happen. Did it? Oh my God, did that just happen?”

Leena shakes her, gently but with urgency. “Claudia!”

Her brain-gears (what little of them haven’t been completely blown) grind to a halt. “Did I really do that?” she manages, pulling back and burying her face in her hands; she wants to meet Leena’s gaze, to try and find out what she’s thinking, to see if she’s mad at her, but she’s too humiliated to even think about eye-contact. “Did I _really_ just do that? Oh my God, Leena, tell me I didn’t really just do that...”

“You really just did that,” Leena replies.

She’s unnaturally calm now, like it’s not really a surprise at all that Claudia just freakin’ threw herself at her, like this is all part of some great plan or something. Maybe she’s just trying to offset Claudia’s rising panic, to lead by example, like she’s trying to calm Claudia down before she gives herself a heart attack by being calm herself or something... but, if that is what she’s shooting for, it is so completely not working. In fact, it’s having quite the opposite effect, and Claudia feels her racing pulse go even faster than it already is, a violent counterpoint to Leena’s inappropriate calmness.

“Oh my _God_!” she wails again.

It’s only when Leena finally gives up and actually flat-out tells her to calm the hell down and breathe (she actually says it, too, in those exact words, and that would have been all kinds of hilarious coming from her, if only Claudia was in any condition to laugh) that she realises she’s actually kind of literally hyperventilating now. Which, okay, in her defence, if there was ever a situation that called for a little hyperventilation, this would so totally be it... but that’s not really helping right now to get oxygen into her already-starved brain.

So she tries to do what Leena tells her to do. Not because she’s been told to do it, but because she’s a little afraid that she’ll black out if she doesn’t, and a trip to the hospital would be so the opposite of what she needs right now. So she tries to breathe, deep and slow, like Leena’s telling her to. Lowers herself down into an unsteady crouch, right there on the carpet, and puts her head between her knees. Gulps down a lungful of air, then another, then one more for good measure. Feels her heart rate inching its way, slowly but surely, back to... well, as close to normal as it’s likely to get at the moment, which admittedly really isn’t very, but, hey, at least it’s a start.

“Oh man...” she babbles, rather more at the floor than at Leena; she keeps her head down and doesn’t look up. “I don’t know what I was thinking. I don’t even... I mean you’re not... and I don’t... and it’s not... and... I mean, we... I mean, this... I mean... I don’t... I’m not... this isn’t... I don’t...”

There is no conceivable way of saying what she’s trying to say without landing herself in even more trouble than she’s already in, even if she was capable of forming sounds that could pass for words in the first place. Which she’s really not. So, because she doesn’t have much of a choice, she gives up the hopeless effort with a shuddery little whine, and just goes back to trying to breathe.

“Claudia...” Leena sighs, and it’s like her name is suddenly the only thing she can say.

“Are you gonna, like, press charges?” Claudia blurts out suddenly, yanking her head up and staring fearfully at her. Because, yeah, that’s the most pressing issue here – is she gonna go to federal prison for throwing herself at a sort-of-but-not-quite colleague? “’Cause I swear I wasn’t trying to, like... I mean, I didn’t even... it wasn’t... that is... I didn’t mean to...” She drops her head back down, growls out her frustration into the hole-torn knees of her jeans, and summons just enough strength of mind for a borderline-snarky cry for help. “Dude, help me out here, will you?”

“You’re confused,” Leena tells her, stating the obvious with her usual staggering insight.

“Well, duh,” Claudia grumbles miserably. “I just freakin’ _jumped_ you!”

“You’re being dramatic.” Leena chuckles, like this isn’t the game-changing cataclysm that it actually is, like all she’s done is laughed at an awkward moment or something, not just tried to make out with her, and— and oh God, does this count as ‘sexual harassment in the workplace’? Is she gonna get put on probation?

“Kinda think I have a right to be,” she says, miserable and humiliated. “Leena, I just tried to put my tongue down your—”

“I know,” Leena interrupts, a bit more soberly. “I was there, Claudia. I know exactly what you did.” Her tone is still light, but there’s real weight behind it now. “But there you have it. You wanted to know what I saw in you... why I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to come into my room any more. And now you know.”

“Seriously?” Claudia squeaks, and raises her head again to try and gauge the woman’s expression; like always, it’s wholly inscrutable, which is not even a tiny bit helpful right now. “My aura said I have an irrepressible subconscious urge to make out with you?”

Leena shrugs and smiles, like this is a perfectly acceptable thing for an aura to say. “Pretty much.”

Claudia groans, and lurches back to her feet. Her head is reeling, and she’s dizzy in a way that probably doesn’t have very much at all to do with the lack of oxygen. She can still feel the phantom softness of Leena’s mouth under hers, yielding far more from surprise than desire, and her lips tingle with sensory memory. It feels too good for this moment when she’s supposed to feel so awful, and she wills herself to shake it off.

“Stupid aura,” she mutters. “You think next time, you could maybe give me a heads-up?”

She sighs, and the way that Leena smiles at her, all sympathetic and soft at the edges, even after everything that’s just gone down, makes her stomach flutter in unspeakable ways.

“Claudia,” Leena says patiently, “there are some things that you really have to figure out for yourself.”

“But I don’t!” Claudia insists, protesting a little too much. “I don’t, like... I mean... I don’t... y’know... like, I don’t like you. I mean, y’know... I like you... but I don’t, like...” She gestures, ever more pathetic with every passing breath. “At least... I don’t think I do. Do I? Oh God, do I? No... I mean... _no_. Just... like... it’s just... I mean... I’m not...”

“I know,” Leena says, and there’s something in her voice that sounds almost like regret. “You just...”

“...wanna jump your bones, apparently,” Claudia grimaces.

“I was going to say ‘you’re just confused’,” Leena replies coolly. “But that works too.”

‘Confused’ is pretty much the understatement of the century, at least as far as Claudia is concerned; ‘freaking the hell out’ would be way closer to the mark, and probably still fall pretty short of what’s actually going on inside her head. Her mind is still reeling, doubled over with the effort of trying to piece together the logistics of what the hell she just did... only it can’t really function very well at the moment, because her body (traitor that it is) is kind of really, really, _really_ focused on certain other things right now, things that it really shouldn’t be thinking about at all, much less in the kind of vivid detail that it is, and definitely not at this very awkward moment.

“So, what...” she manages, very slowly, because her brain is all fragmented and sluggish, like a server with way too much traffic. “So I, like, what... I _want_ you now?”

“It looks that way,” Leena says, sounding dazed but strangely noncommittal. She’s touching her lips, seemingly unconsciously, and there’s a distant haze in her eyes.

“And you’re, like, okay with this?” Claudia demands.

“It is what it is,” Leena replies; she’s being evasive, sidestepping, but there’s genuine compassion in her voice, even if it doesn't reach those something-hazed eyes. “Claudia, you can’t help what you’re feeling. I’m certainly not going to try and make you feel guilty about it.”

Claudia winces. “So long as I don’t do it again, right?” she presses, and is kind of floored by the raw disappointment that flares in her chest as she says it; God, she’s got it bad, and when the hell did that even happen?

Leena looks away, then, sharp and kind of noticeably discomfited, and it’s kind of a toss-up whether she’s more bothered by whatever’s going on in her own head, or by the not-so-G-rated thoughts that she can probably see written as clear as day across Claudia’s shamefaced aura. Whatever the case, it means that she doesn’t answer the question right away, and Claudia is thrown by the way her heart starts to pound.

“Leena?” She’s shocked, even frightened, by how breathy and hopeful her voice has become in those few seconds of silence, like the lack of an answer has somehow negated the inevitability of what it’s doomed to be. “Leena? Dude?”

Still nothing, and Claudia is really quite desperately trying not to feel all the things that her chest and her stomach are both insisting she wants to, but her body is kind of in control of her brain here, and her mind has basically just put up a sign that reads _‘BRB, gone on vacation, see y’all at Christmas’_ and run the hell away. But Leena’s still not talking, and all she can think about is how she’s not said ‘no’ yet, and how that can’t possibly mean what she suddenly, inexplicably, kind of desperately wants it to mean.

“Leena?” she says again, and then just goes for broke; after all, she can’t possibly do herself or her ego any more damage than she already has, right? “You... you _don’t_ want me to do it again, right? Right?”

At long last, Leena meets her gaze again, and there’s something behind her eyes that Claudia has never seen before, something that’s almost a little bit dark, shot through with what looks like pain. Claudia’s chest constricts, and her ribcage is suddenly like a vice, clenching and tightening around her pounding heart, squeezing the pulse right out of it. Did she put that pain on her face? Is this all her fault?

“You’re not going to do it again, Claudia,” Leena tells her, a heart-rending confirmation at long last, and sweeps back into the kitchen without another word.

\---

Because it’s pretty much the only thing she can do, Claudia runs up the stairs and dives into the shower.

She runs the water hot enough to scald, so that the little bathroom fills up with steam and she can’t see anything at all, so that even biting her lip doesn’t keep the yelp inside when she steps under the stream and feels the instant burn on her skin.

The water isn’t the only thing running hot, she realises, a humiliating moment later than she probably should have; her body is feeling it too, and that is just forty-two flavours of wrong. Her thoughts are wild, still chaotic and unhinged, but her body speaks loud and clear in a language that she can’t ignore.

Holy crap, she _does_ want her.

It’s horrible, shameful, but she can’t deny it. She has no idea when the hell it happened, or how, or why, or anything at all, only that it’s there and it’s unavoidable and, as if what she’s just done hadn’t made the point well enough, the heat pulsing in waves through parts of her that aren’t even touched by the searing water is more than enough to make the whole humiliating issue completely inescapable. She doesn’t know much about this sort of thing, woefully under-educated for someone as old as she is, but she knows enough to know what the flaring ache means.

Fact is, she’s got it bad. And, even by her own standards of stupidity, that’s pretty... well, _stupid_.

The anger swells up, sharp and potent, radiating out in all directions and pounding in time with the rhythm of the water, dousing the arousal and striking her body a different kind of hot. Suddenly she’s angry at everyone – at herself for feeling this way in the first place, at Leena for making her feel it, at Myka for leaving, at HG for making her leave... maybe even at Pete and Artie, though she has no idea why she should be – and it somehow manages to be both overpoweringly destructive and familiarly reassuring at the same time. She gulps it down until she’s drunk on it, takes it all in, lets it drown her because it’s the only emotion left inside her that she can trust.

It’s safer to be burnt alive by rage than by the other thing. That much she knows for sure, and so she embraces it.

Because, like always, the anger is pretty much the only thing inside of her that she can actually make any kind of sense from, the only sensation that she can understand, that she can hear at all through the screaming tumult in her head, and she clings to it just like she always has, like the violence within her is some kind of twisted and tattered security blanket woven of thorns and blades instead of fabric and warmth, like it can protect her even as it cuts into her hands where she grips it.

Anger is comforting. She knows it well, and she knows how to deal with it. It’s lived within her for so long, feeding on the carrion of her heart, that it’s practically a part of her by now, an imprint on her soul. It’s like a stain that she knows can’t ever be cleaned away, and so she’s come to accept it in a kind of screwed-up, self-destructive symbiosis.

So, yeah, she embraces it. Stays right there in the shower, occasionally pummelling the tiled walls with her fists, until the water snaps from impossibly hot to icicle cold (like always, without so much as a moment’s notice, like the heat’s just had some kind of power surge or something) and she has no choice but to get out or else risk hypothermia.

...not that that’s such a terrible option for her right now, she concedes, but it would just give Leena an opening for yet another self-righteous lecture when she inevitably ends up being the one who has to drive Claudia to the hospital (because, yeah, her karma is just that sucky), and that is so totally not going to happen if she has anything to say about it. So, really, even if it does go against the grain of her petulant self-destruction, it’s simply the best option to just get the hell out and put on some clothes.

She dresses down, the most beaten-up and hole-riddled jeans that she owns and a stretched-out tee-shirt with a decidedly M-rated slogan printed in anarchic scrawl across the chest. It’s an outfit that screams with youthful rage against the cruel unfairness of life, and she’s picked it quite deliberately because she knows perfectly well that it will earn a Look from Artie, who, by this point, is pretty much the only person left in her sad and pathetic life that she’s actually allowed to even talk to any more, much less deliberately torment.

Well, there’s Pete... but she knows him too well, and she knows that his reaction to her shirt du jour will be less of a Look and more of a (probably literal) ‘LOL’.

She stalks loudly back down the stairs, kind of secretly hoping to attract attention; this crap is clearly not dealt with on any level at all, and she just really wants to figure out what the hell has just happened, and what it even means – for her own self, of course, but mostly for Leena’s sake. She can’t bear the thought that her body’s impulsive stupidity might have screwed things up even more than they already are, and she aches to just _talk_ about this.

Except, of course, the desire to talk about stuff is so unlike her, so uncharacteristic and unusual that it makes her feel weird inside, restless and uneasy, and scared on a whole new level on top of the eighteen others that she’s already feeling. Her mind is twitching again, starting to hurt, and she wills herself not to think too hard about this stuff right now, or her brain will just shut the hell down.

“Goin’ to the Warehouse!” she yells, calling out in no particular direction but with enough volume to make it clear that she’s asking for attention. “Don’t, like, wait up or anything.” She grunts irritably, then adds under her breath, in the secret subconscious hope that even that will be overheard, “Not that you would, anyway...”

Naturally, it only serves to fuel the ever-present anger when Leena neglects to respond at all. There’s a part of her that’s kind of relieved, that realises that maybe the best way of dealing with this mess as it currently stands is to give it a little time and space, a little breathing room so they can both figure out where they stand and what’s going on inside their own heads. But that doesn’t change the part of her that is young and angry and impatient, the part that just wants to deal with all of this right the hell now.

So, of course, because she’s still a brat at heart, she takes a near-criminal amount of pride and pleasure in slamming the door so hard that the glass rattles.

\---

She gets back to the Warehouse in record time, but, as it happens, she doesn’t get much of a chance to work on her projects.

She’s only been there for half an hour or so when Artie calls her on the Farnsworth, demanding in a characteristically agitated tone that she get her ‘delinquent butt’ prepped for a new mission, and Claudia is simultaneously grateful for the distraction and frustrated by the fact that it will no doubt mean another day or more without getting any resolution to this whatever-the-hell-it-is that’s just thrown her world into even more chaos than it was already in.

Because she’s still angry, then, she doesn’t change her shirt, and of course it turns out that the one day she decides to wear her most obscene tee-shirt for a mission is also the same day that Artie decides he wants to tag along for said mission.

He’s feeling better, she supposes; the splint is off his arm now, and, if the look on his face is anything to go by, he’s probably got a touch of cabin fever from all the time spent ‘resting’ (not that he’s done much of that, she knows, but at the very least he’s had to put on a show of it for the rest of them). Of course, he spins it like he’s keeping an eye on her and Pete, making sure they’re doing their jobs properly and not just goofing around and generally being bad influences on each other (like they would ever do such a thing!), but Claudia can tell that the whole thing is way more for his own benefit than it is for theirs.

Still, his obvious excitement about getting to leave the Warehouse for the first time since That Day isn’t enough to overshadow his disgust when he sees what she’s wearing.

“Claudia...” he warns, eyeing her.

“What?” she demands, folding her arms across her chest in an ineffectual feint at obscuring the phrase in question. “Dude, quit staring!”

It doesn’t deter him, of course, but luckily Pete’s there to play interference. “Like he’d even know what it means anyway,” he grins.

Artie huffs. “I’m not _that_ old, you know...”

He looks genuinely offended, like they don’t have this exact same discussion sixty-three thousand times a day, and Claudia realises with some pleasant surprise that the teasing little smirk she’s got lifting the corners of her lips as she looks at him isn’t entirely fake.

“You so are, geezer,” she throws back.

“Get changed!” he barks, and she can tell he’s just saying it to be spiteful now.

Instantly, she changes her tone, suddenly all forced contrition and exaggerated innocence and _‘but I didn’t really mean it’_ , and all those other tricks they both know he’s completely immune to by now. “Oh, but, Artie—”

“NOW!” he roars.

“C’mon, Claud,” Pete says, draping an arm across her shoulders and guiding her away before Artie has a chance to throw out any more unwanted instructions to either of them.

After about an hour (and another three disapproved-of shirt changes, which, hello, totally his fault and not hers; she would’ve been happy with the first one!), the three of them are piled into Artie’s car, and Claudia really isn’t sure what’s more annoying – the fact that Pete gets to sit shotgun while she has to sulk and scowl in the back (which kind of doesn’t really exist, and why couldn’t they have taken Pete’s car?!), or the fact that Artie, as the designated driver, is happily vetoing every single one of her suggestions for the CD changer.

As far as missions go, this one is actually pretty cool – they’re after General Custer’s coat or hat or shoes or something – and Claudia kind of suspects that Artie’s opted to tag along more for the free trip to the Smithsonian than to ‘keep an eye on you two troublemakers’ (as he takes so much pride in claiming). Not that she minds the old guy getting out of the house once in a while, of course – it must be hard for him to hang out with stuff his own age when it all lives so very far away – but still, did he really need to drag both her and Pete along for this little snag and bag?

As it turns out, the answer to that is a resounding, and somewhat disastrous, ‘no’.

\---

The thing about Claudia is, she’s kinda sorta clumsy.

Like, kinda sorta _really_ clumsy, actually, and about a thousand times more so when she’s trying to impress the kinda sorta father-figure type dude who has done so much for her. And, yeah, that would’ve been an omen for horrible things just in and of itself... only , of course, genius that he is, Artie had to go and bring Pete along too.

And, okay, so Pete isn’t exactly clumsy (at least not in the way that she is), but he’s kind of goofy, and a little gangly... and, well, if Leena wasn’t not-talking to Claudia right now, she’s pretty sure that the woman would have gladly attested to the amount of crap in the B&B that she’s had to fix or replace (or fix and then replace ten minutes later) after the two of them were let loose in the same room as each other for more than eight seconds at a time.

Separately, they radiate accidental property damage. Together, they’re a seven-course recipe for disaster. And, really, Artie should have known better than to throw himself in the mix as well.

They’re sneaking around under cover of darkness, and Artie’s pretty much the only one of them who has any idea where they’re going. Well, he claims he does, at least; Claudia isn’t entirely convinced, and she’s sure she caught him shooting a surreptitious glance at the tourist guide on no fewer than three separate occasions. At any rate, she supposes he’s probably the closest thing to a navigational brain they’ve got between them, and so Claudia and Pete just kind of tag along a few paces behind and hope against all reasonable logic that he’ll get them in and out of the place in one piece.

It’s all going great (or, well, okay) until they actually reach the thing, and apparently it’s kind of hard to get out of its little preservation case or whatever because, after about three minutes of ridiculously exaggerated huffing and puffing, Artie finally gives up and calls out to Pete to help him.

Really, it’s something of a mystery as to why he didn’t just get the dude to do it on his behalf in the first place (Pete is, after all, and for all his faults, the most muscularly-endowed of them all, and busting stuff open is never something he’s had any trouble with), but Claudia rather suspects that the old guy was looking for an opportunity to show off his own so-called ‘skills’ or something. Yeah, dude, nice try.

At any rate, he surrenders in the end, and Pete naturally deduces that the most sensible response to being needed is to hand off his Tesla to Claudia and order her to keep watch.

Claudia is more than happy to take this instruction, not just because it came from Pete and not Artie, but also because it gets her up-close and personal with a real-life Tesla for the first time since she’s started work on her little Tesla-shaped side-project. So, yeah, okay, so maybe she takes advantage of that a little bit, studying the thing when she should be watching out for security guards... but that doesn’t really make it her fault when stuff gets shot to hell and back, does it?

Well, okay, so maybe it does.

The thing is, the Smithsonian is kind of a big deal. And, yeah, unlike certain other places, they actually do have security guards. And, yeah, when someone like Pete – who can’t even put his shoes on right without making enough noise to freak out Myka’s ferret from three rooms away (and the thought sends a jolt of pain right through Claudia’s chest, because she realises she actually kind of even misses the little fleabag by now, too, but she powers through it) – busts open a protective case of super-insulated glass... well, chances are, it’s going to attract a little notice.

He’s not a big dude, the guy who finds them, but, by the time he shows up Claudia, is mostly (which is to say ‘completely’) not paying very much attention to her surroundings, so he’s pretty much on top of them before she realises that he’s there at all. And it’s only when the air rings out with a cry of “What the hell is going on in here!?!” that she snaps back to reality to find Artie glaring at her and the dude towering over all three of them that she realises she’s probably kind of missed her opportunity to Tesla his ass all stealthy-like.

This is what happens, she thinks bitterly in the half-second before the blinding terror kicks in, when you let the apprentice hold the only weapon.

And, so, okay, maybe she kind of panics. And, okay, so maybe when she’s panicking, she isn’t exactly the most accurate shot in the world (not that she’s the most accurate shot in the world even when she’s not panicking, but at least she’s got a sort-of excuse when she is). And maybe, by ‘not so accurate’ she kind of actually means ‘so completely inaccurate that she fires the Tesla in exactly the wrong direction and, instead of disarming the dude who’s snuck up on them and is threatening them all with federal prison, kinda sorta accidentally takes out Pete instead’. Maybe.

...but it’s not like that’s her _fault_. Except for the part where it is. Kind of like everything else that’s wrong with the universe right now is her fault, and she would feel terrible about it, except there’s no time.

The thing is, though, this is exactly what she’s been so terrified of, the reason why, for all that she wanted to have Pete’s back, for all that she’s been so desperate to go out with him on all the missions she can get, to protect him and keep him safe and take care of him like the fierce little sister she’s supposed to be, for all that it’s all she’s wanted in the world, she’s been just as terrified of exactly something like this happening.

Because, yeah, she’s accident-prone and she’s clumsy, and she’s awkward and stupid and prone to screw the hell up. She knows it, and he knows it, and Artie knows it. Hell, everyone in the whole damn world knows it (even the security guard who’d never even met her before today, in fact), and really it was only a matter of time before she screwed up on a level that would cause someone she really cares about to get hurt.

And she’s trying so hard to spin this, to put on her cocky teenager face and insist that it’s not her fault, but the demons in her head are screaming and baying for her blood because they know better. And all she wants in the world is to curl up in a corner and cry, to throw the Tesla from her and never touch it again, even as she knows that Pete won’t blame her for it (knows too that he’d be just as likely to make the same mistake if he’d been the one with the Tesla, though that doesn’t exactly make her feel any better about the situation), but she can’t do that because they’re still sitting there in the middle of the frying pan right now, and she can’t exactly wallow in self-pity until they’re safe.

Thankfully (not that she’d ever admit to being grateful for it), Artie’s on hand to save the day. He whips out a weird-looking thing (and Claudia’s at least 90% sure that she really does not want to know what it is), and the next thing she knows, they’re back out on the street, with the artefact, and a Tesla’d Pete snoring gently at their feet.

Claudia doubles over, reeling from the whatever-the-hell-it-was that Artie just used on them (oh yeah, her brain whimpers as her insides twist themselves up at impossible angles her, she definitely doesn’t want to know what it was), and, when she straightens up again a moment or two later, she finds herself staring up into his angry, disapproving eyes. He doesn’t say anything, but he doesn’t really have to because the look on his face is pretty much saying it all for him.

She opens her mouth to apologise, maybe even to try and defend herself (not that there’s really much in the way of that, but she’s got to try because if she doesn’t she’s pretty sure she’s going to cry), but he holds up the hand that’s still gripping the _deus ex machina_ that’s just saved their necks, and turns away.

“I don’t want to hear it,” he tells her, and the cold disappointment in his voice brings tears to her eyes.

(It’s entirely possible she’s going to cry anyway.)

“Artie,” she forces out. “I—” 

“Did I not make myself clear?” he demands. “I said I don’t want to hear it. Now, go back to the car, get in, stay there, and, for the love of all things holy, _don’t touch anything_.”

She hangs her head, but does what she’s told. Maybe on another day, she would have tried to fight him, to insist that he hear her out, that he give her a chance to defend herself even if they both know it’s a fruitless endeavour... but the fact is, she doesn’t have a damn thing worth saying. Plain and simple, she screwed up. She screwed up _again_ , and now Pete is unconscious and Artie’s disappointed in her (he and Leena should start a support group, she thinks bitterly – they could even make _‘I survived Claudia Donovan’_ tee-shirts), and the world has gone upside-down all over again, for about the eighty-fifth time in less than twenty-four hours, and everything is just so completely wrong... and it’s all her fault.

Basically? It’s the worst day ever.

\---

“Hey, uh... Myka?”

Claudia swallows hard, and grips the phone hard enough that she imagines the plastic buckling under her fingers. Pete’s still out cold, sprawled flat-out across the back of the car, and Artie’s paying for the tank of gas he’s just poured into the thing. They’re at some run-down gas station, one of those middle-of-nowhere places that’s come right out of a crappy 1950s movie and is thus perfectly suited to Artie’s purposes, and Claudia is leaning against the hood of the car and waiting for him to get back.

She’s on edge, really twitchy; her nerves are frayed practically to nonexistence, and she knows beyond all rational doubt that what she’s doing right now is by far the stupidest thing she’s ever done – and, yeah, that even includes making out with Leena and accidentally KO’ing Pete with his own Tesla, and even the last time she tried to do this, too – but, just like with those other moments of sheer Claudia-shaped dumbassery, she can’t seem to stop herself from doing it anyway.

“So, uh... hey...”

Oh God, this is definitely worse than last time. And, up till now, she was fairly certain that wasn’t possible.

“Look, uh... so... so, I know you kind of... I know you never replied to my last message, and I dunno, maybe you didn’t even hear it... and, hey, that’s totally cool, y’know, I get that it probably means you wanna be alone or somethin’... or, I dunno, maybe it just means you don’t wanna hear from me. And that’s... y’know, that’s okay. So, y’know, if that’s what it is, then I’m... I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Myka, I’m really sorry for bugging you again if you don’t want to hear from me... and you know I wouldn’t, only... it’s just...”

Her voice cracks, but she’s on a run now and she refuses to let herself slow down; if she slows down, even for a second, she knows, she’ll fall apart completely, and it’ll be all over. She is so not about to let herself burst into tears all over Myka’s voicemail.

“...God, everything’s all so screwed up,” she whimpers brokenly, and she sounds so much like a little kid, so pathetic that she kind of wants to sock herself in the jaw just to give herself a reason to sound that way. “It’s all gone to hell, and it’s pretty much all my fault... it’s all my fault, Myka... and that’s... y’know, we both kinda get that that’s nothin’ new, right? Only... only you’re not here to tell me that. You’re not here to say that it’s okay, that we all screw up, that stuff is gonna come out right, that Pete won’t die and Leena won’t hate me forever and not everything in the whole universe is my fault, and... and I really need you to tell me all that stuff right now, Myka, I really, really need it. ’Cause it doesn’t... it really doesn’t feel like it, and you’re the only person who...”

She stops. For all that she can’t let herself slow down, it hurts too much to keep going. And she’s pretty sure that none of it even matters anyway, because Myka’s not going to come back no matter what she says, so what’s the freaking point of all this anyway?

“Y’know what?” she hears herself blurt out, changing directions so fast she almost gives herself whiplash. “Forget it. Just forget I ever said anything. Forget I even called at all. It’s all cool, y’know, it’s all fine, everything’s awesome. It’s not like I... oh, I dunno... it’s not like I tried to jump Leena’s bones, and then shot Pete with a Tesla right in front of Artie or anything stupid like that, right? ’Cause, hell, nobody’s that much of a freakin’ idiot, are they? Nobody in the universe is dumb enough to do that, right? And... and... and even if they were, y’know... all hypothetical-like, even if there was someone, y’know, someone like me, y’know, a me-shaped someone who was dumb enough to jump Leena’s bones and then shoot Pete with a Tesla and all that other crap... even if that did happen – which it didn’t, but if it did – it wouldn’t matter to you, right? You’d still think that stupid hypothetical someone was kind of cool anyway, right? Or, well, y’know, not like _cool_ , cool... just kinda, like, not the most awful human being on the whole planet? Y’know, hypothetically, and all. If someone did all that, you... you’d still think...”

She trails off. Myka’s voicemail doesn’t judge her. In fact, it doesn’t say anything at all.

“Right,” Claudia sighs. “Cool. That’s... that’s great. Thanks, Myka.” She squeezes her eyes shut, and can’t help looking at this whole one-sided conversation and seeing just one more moment of weakness that she’s not tough enough or brave enough to resist. “I guess I’ll see you around, then? Or, well, uh... y’know, probably not. But, hey, thanks for listening. Or not listening. Or whatever. And, uh...” She bites her lip, waits for the taste of blood to strengthen her, and tries not to think about how much she’s been depending on that of late. “...we still miss you, okay? So, uh... so take care of yourself. ’Cause, y’know, we’re not gonna stop worrying about you just ’cause you’re not here. And the only difference is that we’re not there to make sure you do. So you gotta do it for us. Okay? So, yeah. Uh...”

She hangs up quickly, without so much as a ‘goodbye’, and the click and pulse of the line going dead reverberate in her head for the rest of the day.

\---

By the time they get back to the B&B, Pete is conscious, if a little groggy.

He doesn’t blame her for it, because he’s cool that way, but that doesn’t really make her feel any better. In fact, it actually kind of makes her feel a whole lot worse about the whole thing, because he’s Pete and his natural instinct is to try and make her feel better by cracking jokes about his own mishaps... and, of course, almost all of his little ‘moments’ open with the ominous line, _“So, this one time, me and Myka...”_ , and Claudia really doesn’t trust herself to even hear Myka’s name right now without bursting into tears.

Artie, by contrast, most definitely does blame her, but she would have expected no less from him. It’s as close to comfort as she’s going to find, she supposes, the familiar scowl on his face when he tells her that Mrs Frederic will be hearing about this, in great detail.

So let her hear about it, Claudia thinks viciously. Let her hear everything, all of her screw-ups, every last frackin’ detail. Let her hear in super-loud Surround Sound how much of a disaster Claudia Donovan is, how terrible a choice she would be as the next Caretaker or whatever ‘plans’ they have in place for her. Let her hear the whole freakin’ thing.

The thought is malicious, but the idea really isn’t. She genuinely doesn’t want to let Mrs F. down; in fact, that’s pretty much the last thing in the world that she wants. She just wants to make her see – like, really and truly see, and not be able to deny it – that Claudia really isn’t right for this, that her place is hidden quietly away behind her computer screens, safe inside her comfort zone. She needs her to understand that, when people let her go out into the real world, when they put dangerous things in her hands, then bad things happen to good people. She needs Mrs F. to see the kind of chaos she’s capable of unleashing, wilfully or not, and to realise that that sort of thing shouldn’t ever be allowed to happen at all, much less actively encouraged.

Also, by this point, she’s pretty sure that she never wants to go on another mission again, so long as she lives.

Leena’s waiting for them when they get back (of course she is, because clearly today hasn’t sucked enough), and her eyes are dark and sad even as her smile is as bright and cheerful as it always is. Claudia is mostly sure that Artie doesn’t notice the unusual sorrow lining her usually warm face, and she’s definitely sure that Pete’s still too disoriented to notice very much of anything at all, so – lucky her! – it’s pretty much exclusively for her benefit.

Not that she’s doing it on purpose. She’s not; Claudia knows that. Leena may be a great many things, and most of them annoying as hell, but she has never, ever been vindictive.

Ever the considerate hostess, she has dinner ready for them, and of course that means an hour or more spent sitting at the table and cringing while Pete regales the room with tales of Claudia’s ineptitude. For her own part, Claudia stubbornly refuses to either talk or eat, and curls both her legs under her so that her feet are on the chair, because she knows that it annoys... well, pretty much everyone except Pete, actually. It’s not so much malice, as it is a futile bid at directing their attention onto more minor issues; if they’re yelling at her for having her feet up on the furniture, at least that means that can’t be yelling at her for screwing up.

Of course, it doesn’t work that way, and nobody even notices her pathetic shot at teenage rebellion; Pete is too busy gesticulating, Artie is too busy glaring, and Leena is too busy looking gracefully pensive and staring into space. Claudia might as well not be there at all for all the difference she’s going to make to this conversation.

“Consider yourself grounded,” Artie tells her as he finishes his sixth bread roll, finally addressing her directly. “Until further notice.”

Pete jumps to her defence, like she knew he would, but Claudia doesn’t really want to be defended right now; she just wants to wallow in her own guilt-ridden misery. “C’mon, Artie, man...” he says, even though she can tell he probably knows that she doesn’t want the kindness he’s offering. “It was just bad luck. It could’ve happened to anyone. Hell, you know I would’ve done the same if you hadn’t needed me to open that cabinet for you.”

His eyes lock on Claudia’s in a wordless expression of _‘I got your back’_ , but she’s feeling too sorry for herself to try to acknowledge, even it out of politeness. Besides, there’s something in his face that isn’t entirely about her. It’s like he doesn’t care, like he really and truly doesn’t care that he just got Tesla’d in the head by the dumb chick who was supposed to be on his side.

And it’s not like normal Pete, who wouldn’t care because he’d be laughing it off and making a show of how funny it was, who’d be playing up to Claudia’s youth and clumsiness and pretending like it was something to be proud of, who’d be counterpointing Artie’s anger with his big-brother hi-jinks, cooling the old guy’s crankiness with his careless indifference. It’s not like that at all; it’s the new Pete, the Pete that’s heartbroken but won’t admit it; it’s the Pete who’s still thinking about all the things he’s lost, because this whole display has nothing at all to do with him being playful and silly and _Pete_ about it, and everything to do with him just flat-out honest-to-whatever not caring what happens to him. He doesn’t care if he gets shot in the head, and he doesn’t care how much of a game he could make it into. He doesn’t care about anything at all, because Myka’s not there, and so what’s the freakin’ point?

Claudia doesn’t say anything, but it makes her feel like even more of a failure than she already does; Pete is hurting, really hurting, probably more than any of them, and she’s trying so hard to be the fun kid sister that takes his mind off how much pain he’s in, but really she’s just making it more and more awful for him (and, really, for all of them) with all of the stupid, juvenile crap that she’s been pulling. The thing is, everything she does, every single little thing – to Pete, to Leena, even for her own self – just seems to make it more and more excruciatingly obvious that, without Myka, none of them can really function at all.

“She _shot_ you, Pete!” Artie is roaring, oblivious to all of this; Pete gives a hollow but raucous laugh, and Leena mirrors it with one of her own; both of them are laughing more out of practiced politeness than any real amusement, but it’s enough to give Artie an opening to criticise all the same. “Oh, yes, laugh it all away...” he goes on, glaring at them both until they quiet down. “...but would you be laughing so hard if you were still in the secret service, and that was a real gun instead of a Tesla? No, Pete, because you’d be in the hospital with a bullet in your head.”

Pete’s face falls at that, and Claudia blinks back tears. “Yeah, man,” he concedes softly, “but we’re not. And we don’t. And, c’mon, dude, d’you really think I’d’ve given Claud a real gun?” He glances at her. “No offence, Claud.”

“That’s not the point!” Artie yells, before she has a chance to respond (not that she was planning to, anyway). “The point is, Pete, that mistakes cost lives.” He turns to glare at Leena and then Claudia in turn, and suddenly – in Claudia’s twisted mind, at least – this kind of isn’t just about the Tesla any more. “They _cost lives_. And they have to be punished accordingly.” His eyes lock on Claudia, then, to the exclusion of everyone and everything else in the room, and a skittering chill runs up her spine. “And we all have to grow up and take responsibility when we make them.” He jabs a finger at her, and Claudia knows that he’s just going to repeat what he’s already says, but she musters a token flinch just the same when he roars, “Grounded!”

Claudia’s tongue hurts now, from all the biting she’s been doing since she sat down, but she still refuses to say anything out loud... to Artie, or to anyone else.

Pete sighs. “Artie, man, I’m fine. Cut her some slack, okay?”

“Oh, believe me,” Artie says, in his most cryptic voice. “This is cutting her some ‘slack’.”

Claudia is just about done with all of this. And it’s not because she begrudges Artie his lectures, but because she is so exhausted by Pete trying to justify what she did. She can’t bear the look on his face, that hollow void that says he’s just going through the motions because it’s what he’s supposed to do, the blank space between his eyes that says he wouldn’t have cared right now if it really had been a real gun. She can’t stand to see him so broken... and, honestly, she can’t stand to look at him right now, when all she can see is the bump on his head, the lingering bruise-shaped marker of all the ways she’s screwed up the one thing she wanted to do right. 

“Whatever,” she mutters, effectively to herself, then pushes back her chair. “Artie’s right, dude, and I don’t care anyway.” She swallows, hating how true it is, and hating even more the look of surprise on Artie’s face when she doesn’t fight him (not even just for the sake of fighting him). “And I’m outta here, so you can save your breath, dude, because I just... I’m not gonna argue about this. I’m not gonna pretend like I’m not the reason you got hurt, like I didn’t...” She trails off, and it really, really hurts. “So I’m grounded. That’s fine. Whatever. Best place for me right now anyway.” She turns to Leena, tries really hard not to cry. “Thanks for dinner.”

She’s on her feet, then, storming like a hurricane towards the door, and she doesn’t look back.

“Claudia—”

It’s only once she’s safely locked up in the haven of her room that she realises she has no idea which of the three of them was calling out to her.

\---

So, yeah. She’s here again, in her room with just her emotions and her guitar, tearing up the strings like it’s the only thing keeping her alive, and the world may look exactly the same as it was the last time, but in truth it’s so completely different... and so is her playing.

The guitar comes alive in her hands, just like it always does. It’s comforting enough just to hold it, the contours familiar and welcoming beneath her fingertips. More comforting still is to tune it, the strings tightening and yielding, bending to her direction without so much as a thought for themselves, bowing to her superior dexterity because they understand – or so she likes to think – that she knows what she’s doing.

Out there in the world, she’s an apprentice, a clumsy kid who has somehow managed to screw two of the people she cares about in one day (and one of them way more figuratively than the other)... but here and now, in her room with her guitar, she’s got skills. In here, she does know what she’s doing. And she is good. She is really damn _good_ , and it doesn’t matter how badly she fails outside this room because in here, tuning those strings, she’s a god.

More comforting than any of that, though, is the pure and simple joy of playing. For all the things that are falling apart all around her, the people and the places and the pain she’s caused and felt and caused all over again, for everything that’s gone wrong and everything that will probably never be right ever again... in spite of all that crap, this is one place where she can be in control. The sound, the sharps and the flats, the rise and fall of raw music, all shaping themselves into something new, the composition new and exclusively hers. Her world, her rules, a universe of her own making. The air comes alive, bending itself to the shape of her rhythm.

She plays by instinct. It’s nothing solid, nothing precise, just random shimmering snippets of feeling expressed in the only way that she knows, through the chords flowing off her fingertips, arcs of emotion rending the air without conscious thought. She loses herself to the ebb and dip of alien rhythm, fractured shards of songs that don't exist and never will, ghostly staccato sounds that take her away from this room and this place and the tumult in her head, that take her high and leave her suspended.

It’s an hour, maybe even two, before she finally stops, and when she does, it’s not because her fingers are calloused and sore (like that would’ve stopped her anyway) but because – just for a moment – she fumbles over a note. It’s not the first time, and it sure as hell won’t be the last (as much as she’d like to imagine that she’s infallible, even in this, her perfect world, she is weak and clumsy), but it shatters her concentration nonetheless, driving the rhythm out of her with all the power of an eighteen-wheeler truck throwing itself off a cliff. The music stutters, and the spell is broken. The magic is gone, and she can tell that it won't be back any time soon.

Just like out there, in the toneless, rhythmless real world, she has screwed herself in this.

The silence is fog-thick as the echo of discordant notes fades and dies, and Claudia shuts her eyes against its chill. It’s oppressive, heavy, and she wishes that she could play forever just to keep it away. But she can’t. The guitar is stubborn and useless now, hanging limp and heavy in her hands, as silent as the room around her and unwilling to be played any more. It’s tired, worn out, and there is nothing that Claudia can do but accept that and put it away with a heavy sigh. The guitar hums its gratitude, strings stuttering (as clumsy as she is, if only for a moment) as it settles back against the wall, and she watches it sadly, imagining that it’s falling asleep, that it’s finding its own brand of musical peace.

She wishes she could do that as well, just close her eyes and lean against the wall and sleep until someone needs her.

But, of course, she can’t. And even if she could, it turns out, she’s doomed to be interrupted within a few too-brief minutes anyway. She’s barely even managed to tear her gaze away from the resting instrument, in fact, before she hears a tentative knock at the door, and she knows who it is even before she hears her name stammered through the surface.

“Claudia?”

“Go away!” she barks, all reflexive aggression. Her voice is shaking so much so that she can’t even try to disguise it, shot through with the revenant tremors of pain, though, and so, because she has no choice but to acknowledge it, she adds, hopelessly helpless, “...please.”

Of course the door swings open anyway, ignoring both the demand and the plea, and of course it’s Leena standing there.

“You stopped playing,” she says simply, like that in itself is a perfectly acceptable reason to come sauntering uninvited into someone’s room.

Claudia glares at her. She knows that Leena won’t buy her hyper-defensive attitude any more than she herself does, but she also knows that she is smart enough to not draw attention to it, that she’ll let Claudia feign as much unjustified anger as she wants, without so much as a word of protest. And maybe that in itself is a gift, a kind of something that only Leena can give her, and maybe, before everything went wrong, that would have been reason enough to keep her around, but right now Claudia can’t even look at her without feeling pain.

“What do you want?” she growls.

“I just wanted to know why you stopped playing,” Leena answers, and Claudia hates that she actually seems to be telling the truth. “It was very pretty, whatever it was. I don’t know the song, but...”

“That’s ’cause it’s mine,” Claudia replies, weirdly protective of her fragmented almost-composition.

Leena blinks, like that’s some new and alien concept. “Really?”

“Yeah, Leena. Music doesn’t just come out of thin air, y’know. People gotta make it.”

“I know that,” Leena says calmly. “I just didn’t know that you...” She trails off, studying Claudia with a kind of worried intensity, then abruptly drops the subject entirely. “Anyway. It was really lovely.”

“Yeah. Cool. Thanks. But I don’t do audiences, so...”

It’s a less-than-subtle plea for her to turn around and leave, but of course Leena plays the same feigned ignorance that she always does when someone asks or tells her to do something other than what she’s already got in mind; she knows exactly what her companions want, because she knows everything, but she invariably refuses to do it until she’s achieved what she wants. Claudia might as well stop telling the sun to shine in through the window, for all the effect it’ll have on this infuriating, beautiful woman.

“Why did you stop playing?” Leena asks again, sticking firmly to her proposed reason for being here.

Claudia throws her hands up. “Because I wanted to!” she explodes. “Okay? Because I was freakin’ finished! Is that an acceptable reason for stopping something?”

“Of course it is...” Leena takes a slow step backwards, seemingly without even realising that she’s doing it, then switches tactics once again with a tired little sigh. “Claudia, I swear, I don’t want to argue. I promise, I was just really enjoying your music. That’s all. I really, honestly did not come here to fight.”

And, yeah. Truthfully, Claudia is getting tired of the fighting too. They’ve never had the most amicable relationship, even when they’re actually getting along – Claudia’s always too aggressive and Leena’s always so aggravatingly passive – but there’s always been a kind of acceptance in the tension between them.

Leena never takes offense when Claudia challenges her, even when she steps way over the line, because she knows that it’s not personal. She really and truly does know it, like on a level that nobody else possibly can, because she can see into Claudia’s soul, or her aura, or whatever, and so she knows better than to take the insults as personal slights. And, yeah, once she’s calmed down from whatever’s pissed her off in any given moment, Claudia is honestly grateful for that; it’s kind of cool to have someone, just one person in all the chaos, who she can shoot all her obnoxious juvenile rage at, who she can treat as unfairly as she wants, and know that it won’t result in any real upset.

She misses that. Misses the times when Leena was just Leena, and she was just Claudia, and they just kind of bounced off each other like dodgeballs off a wall. She misses the Leena who would smile at her no matter how horrible she was, who would understand what she was feeling even without either of them having to say a word.

Most of all, she misses the Leena that’s shown up since Myka’s been gone. She misses the Leena who would share her pain and heal her own by easing Claudia’s, the Leena who knew when to push and when to back off, when to talk to her and when to just hold her. She misses her bed. She misses those endless, sleepless nights... the nights where Leena’s arms were the perfect surrogate for the sanctuary she’d lost in Myka’s night-light, the nights where the sound of Leena’s breathing was just soothing enough for Claudia to almost imagine what it would feel like to be okay again, the nights where just being there, curled up against her side, felt like being not-alone.

She wants to go back to that, so desperately that it makes her shake. She wants those nights back, and she wants Leena to want them too.

“Claudia,” Leena says, and it looks like she’s about to try again to deflect the real issue onto something irrelevant.

Not this time, though. She won’t deflect this again. Claudia won’t let her.

“Leena.” She swallows hard, tightens her shoulders and stares up at the ceiling. “I... I’m sorry. Okay? I’m _sorry_.”

It’s a real, sincere, honest-to-whatever apology, and that right there is something that just flat-out never happens. Claudia doesn’t apologise, even at the best of times, and she sure as hell doesn’t apologise to Leena. In fact, Leena is pretty much the one person in the known universe that Claudia’s always been sure she’ll never have to actually apologise to; even after all that crap with MacPherson (and, okay, so she still won’t admit – even to herself – that she might have been out of line with that, but she will concede that maybe Leena wasn’t completely to blame for what went down), she’d never actually come out and said she was _sorry_. She’d spun some lame crap, and Leena had seen it for the olive-branch it was, because, even then, she saw everything. But she hadn’t actually said the word. Not then, and not since.

At least, not until now. Because this... this is that word, the actual word, and she can’t and won’t (and doesn’t even want to) take it back. It’s out there now, and she’s glad it is.

Leena doesn’t look surprised; given the weight of what Claudia’s just thrown out there, how unlike her it is for her to actually say such a thing at all, much less to _her_ , she seems quite unjustly blasé about it.

“Claudia,” she sighs, like she’s going to try deflecting again. “I don’t—”

“No,” Claudia forces out; she’d thought she was done, too, but she can’t be. She can’t be done – won’t be done – until she turns that look of calm indifference into one of real emotion, and she doesn’t even care too much what emotion that turns out to be. She just needs to see a reaction, a raw, real, from-the-gut reaction. She needs to see something, to know that she’s not the only one who’s falling apart over this. “Leena, just... just hear me out, please. Just...”

Leena nods. She looks like she’s already bracing herself, and that’s a good sign; it means she’s willing to listen. Claudia steadies her breathing, tries to stop her body from trembling.

“Leena, I... I didn’t go into this wanting you. Okay? When you let me in your bed, I swear I didn’t want you. I swear I didn’t, Leena. I would never... I’d _never_ try to...” She shakes her head. “I didn’t. I didn’t want you when this started. You gotta... if nothin’ else, you gotta believe that.” Leena opens her mouth, but Claudia cuts her off with a wave. “Okay. Yeah. Okay. So, of course you believe it, ’cause we both know you’re, like, a mind-reader or whatever, and you know everything. But, jeez, Leena, I just... I really needed you.” The past-tense cuts into her, so she changes it. “I mean, I need you. Like, not just then, but now. I still need you. Like, right now, I need you. And it’s not like that, y’know? It’s not because I want you. I swear it’s not... I swear I...” Her lungs scream, so she forces down a lungful of air. “I don’t even want to want you. I don’t wanna screw this up, and I don’t wanna... I... like, I didn’t even know that I wanted you... and I swear I never thought... I never even...”

She closes her eyes, reels against the images that flash before her mind’s eye and turn her body hot, wills herself to shunt them aside before they show up in her aura and blow this whole thing to hell all over again.

“Look,” she presses, urgent and desperate, aching with every part of her to make Leena believe her, even as her body tries so hard to betray her honesty. “You don’t gotta... you don’t gotta worry about me jumping you again, or making out with you, or anything like that. I won’t. I won’t do anything, I promise. I just...” She clenches her jaw, breathes in, then slowly breathes out. “I just need you to be like you were. I need you to just... to not be Myka, but close enough. I need _someone_ , Leena, and you... you’re...”

“Claudia.” Leena’s voice is like delicate crystal; one wrong note, and it’ll shatter. “Stop.”

Her head aches. “Don’t make me stop,” she begs. “If I stop, that’s it, and it’s over, and...”

“It’s not over, Claudia.” Leena exhales tightly, and Claudia watches as her eyes flicker shut. “You’re a frightened, confused, troubled young woman. You struggle so hard with so many aspects of your own identity, and it’s completely natural that you would...” She shakes her head, unable to say the words, and doesn’t open her eyes. “And I will be there for you, if you need me to be. I’ll give you everything I can. I promise you, Claudia, I won’t let you be alone. But I... I can’t let you into my bed while you’re feeling like this. I _can’t_.”

“But I swear I won’t—”

“I know you won’t,” Leena replies, and her voice is shot through with that same raw alien something that was in it when she walked away after it happened. “But I can’t guarantee that _I_ won’t.”

It takes a moment for that to sink in. “You... wait, what?”

Leena sighs; it sounds almost broken, like she’s given herself up to something she’s been fighting for so long that the loss of the weight is almost a pain in itself. “Claudia, you’re a very physical person. Everything you do, everything you feel... it’s with your body. You don’t trust your mind, and you’re afraid of your heart... so, naturally, your body is all you have left that you can speak with and know you’ll be understood.”

She’s never really thought about it before, but there might be some grain of truth to that. Claudia most certainly does not trust her mind; after everything it’s been through, it would be really stupid if she did. And, though she’s never really thought about the so-called ‘heart’ in very much detail at all, she knows enough about her own to know that, every time she’s let it feel anything at all, it’s been let down... so, yeah, maybe that part is pretty close to the mark as well. Maybe.

Leena’s not finished yet, though, and Claudia’s emotions can’t decide whether to think this is a good thing or a bad thing, and so she settles for just quietly hyperventilating as the other woman carries on.

“You want me, Claudia, on a physical level. We both know that, but I don’t think you fully understand it. You’re so busy being frightened of yourself, so afraid that it might mean you have ‘feelings’, you’re not looking at what you truly do feel.”

Claudia swallows. Right now, she wants to point out, she’s feeling pretty sheepish; does that count? Leena smiles, like she gets it, but doesn’t let it distract her for more than a half-moment.

“You want me,” she goes on, like Claudia isn’t already intimately aware of that. “You want me _physically_ , Claudia, because physicality is the only kind of emotion that you feel you can trust. Your feelings aren’t emotional, Claudia, and they don’t come from your heart. You want me because I kept your warm, because I gave you comfort when you needed it. I was there for you when nobody else was – I let you into my bed when Myka left hers cold and empty and left you with nowhere else to go. And you let yourself want me because you felt you could trust me... because I gave you the only kind of comfort you’re able to understand.”

“It’s not like that!” Claudia insists. “I’m not, like, using you.”

“No, you’re not.” There’s a small smile in Leena’s voice, mirrored by the one on her face, but it’s touched by sadness in both places. “Because you have a good soul, Claudia, and, even if you don’t really understand it, there’s a part of you that knows wanting someone – physically _wanting_ them – isn’t the same as...”

She breaks off, and Claudia’s pretty sure that this is the first time she’s ever heard Leena actually fail to finish a sentence, in all the time she’s known her. It speaks volumes, sends its message out so loud that even Claudia’s self-confessed ignorance can’t fail to hear it.

“Oh my God,” she hears herself choke out.

Because it’s there, it’s all right there in the shadows under Leena’s eyes, and she has no idea how the hell she missed it, how she failed so completely to see what those shadows were hiding, but it’s as clear as day now, and, if possible, she feels even more awful about it than she did before.

“Claudia...”

But she can’t stop now. “You want me, too,” she accuses, jabbing a finger at her like it’s some kind of crime (when she’s really the last one who can judge, even if it was). “Don’t you?”

“No,” Leena insists, and suddenly her voice is clearer than glass. “ _No_ , Claudia. I don’t _want_ you. This... this is exactly what I’m talking about.”

“Then what?” Claudia demands. “What the hell is this?”

Leena sighs, braces herself, bites down on some imaginary bullet. “Claudia, the things I feel about you are very, very different to the things you feel about me.”

“Different how?” She genuinely doesn’t understand, and she feels like a complete idiot for it, because there’s something like frustration on Leena’s face now, too, colouring the sorrow until they’re both a whole new shade of impossible, until they rewrite themselves completely into something else that’s her fault. “I want you... you want me... that’s a good thing, right? It’s the sort of thing that makes things into, y’know, like, _things_. It’s good! Right?”

“Claudia.” Leena sounds tortured, but her expression is strong, like she realises she has to really drive this home if she wants Claudia to comprehend it. “Physical desire is not the same as emotional investment. It never will be. And what your body desires in me... it’s not the same as what my heart feels for you.”

Claudia’s jaw is kind of nearly touching the floor at this point. “Say what now?”

Leena turns away, using her whole body, so that every part of her face is completely obscured from view. “You’ll outgrow what you’re feeling, Claudia. It’s fleeting, and it’s the product of what’s happening in your life right now. It’s nothing more than that.” She sighs, and the sound is scored with pain, like admitting it out loud almost costs more than she has in her. “Whether Myka comes back to us or not, you are going to move on. And I... I’m sorry, Claudia, but I don’t trust myself to let you in my bed, knowing what you’re feeling and knowing that it’s temporary, without giving in to the part of me that wishes it could change that.”

Claudia’s chest hurts. Like, really hurts. Like _‘oh God, this must be what a heart attack feels like’_ hurts, like she can’t remember what it is to breathe and not gasp out loud with how bad it hurts.

“What the hell are you even saying, Leena?” she forces out, even though she knows the answer pretty damn well now. “That you’ve got... that there are... that you’re...” She shakes her head, glad that the wall is out of reach or she’d be punching it again.

“I’m telling you that it’s not your fault,” Leena says; her voice is calm, but her spine is rigid, and they both know that that’s not what she’s saying at all. “I’m telling you that you didn’t do anything wrong. I’m telling you that I’m not keeping you out of my bed because of anything you’ve done. I’m telling you that I understand why you did what you did, and I don’t blame you for it. That’s what I’m telling you, and that’s all you need to hear.”

She turns back, then, and her eyes are wet. Claudia wants to reach out, to offer some kind of comfort – some kind of _something_! – but she’s fixed hopelessly to the spot.

“Claudia, you burn so bright. So bright, it’s dangerous.” Claudia swallows really hard at that, because it’s so agonisingly close to all the things in herself that she’s so afraid of. “I can’t let myself indulge the things I feel for you, whether you imagine that you’re feeling them too right now or not. I can only do the same thing that I’ve always done for you – try to help you feel the sun that feeds the flames in your soul, to help you see the beauty behind the things that that so frighten you. I can’t let myself do anything more than that.”

She’s stepping forward now, closing the space between them. She’s close, so close, and Claudia can’t breathe. “Leena—”

“I know you’re afraid of yourself, Claudia. And I know that’s why you’re so afraid of being alone. You’re so frightened – so very frightened – that, if there’s nobody to look after you now, there will be nobody to stop you when you can’t stop yourself.” She leans in, and her lips are warm and soft against Claudia’s cheek; the urge to meet those lips with her own is almost overwhelming, but she swallows it down because she has to. “But you’re not alone. You are looked after, and I promise... I promise you, Claudia, that won’t change. But what your soul needs isn’t the same as what your body wants...”

“But you—”

“...and my heart is not the same as yours.” Claudia can’t breathe; it hurts to hear her hurt so much. “Claudia... I can’t be for you and be for myself at the same time. And you need me more. It’s the way it always has been, and the way it always will be. Nothing’s changed now.”

“It’s all changed,” Claudia whimpers. “Everything’s changed. How can I look at you now, and not think about—”

“Because we both know you have to,” Leena tells her. “Because your pain is greater than the things your body wants from me, and it’s greater than the things I wish your heart could feel. Claudia, the world is exactly the same as it was. Myka’s still gone, and your soul is still in turmoil. Your aura’s still screaming at me, and that’s not going to go away just because we’ve both let ourselves get distracted by these things that don’t matter. None of this has changed any of what’s inside you. You’re still lonely and frightened. You’re still scared of yourself, and with good reason, because... because you’re still _dangerous_ , Claudia.. And for as long as that’s true, all I can let myself be is what you need me to be.”

Claudia’s reeling. Her head is spinning with about eighty-six thousand different thoughts, and she can’t pick one apart from any of the others right now. There’s too much input, too much stuff to work through, and she feels kind of like her processor is being overclocked way beyond what it can actually take.

“What about you?” she manages. “How can you just... how can you feel all this crap and still just be, like... _you_? Leena, I don’t even... I’m not even... dude, I’ve only wanted you for like five minutes and it’s taking everything I got to keep from pouncing on you right now. How can you... how can you be so freakin’ zen about this stuff?”

Leena shrugs; she still looks sad, so heartbreakingly sad, but also determined. “Because I have to be.”

“And you’re okay with that?”

Leena looks her right in the eye. She doesn’t blink, doesn’t flinch. She doesn’t move at all, just stands there, brave and steady, everything in her and everything that Claudia needs. And, for a moment, that’s enough. She just looks right at her, right into her soul, and lets Claudia do the same in turn. Lets her see right into the shadows behind her eyes, really and truly see the emotion in her, to see and taste and know everything that she feels and everything that she knows, the two always so much in competition with each other... and, most of all, beyond everything else, the acceptance that this is how it has to be.

She’s so strong. Claudia can’t fathom ever being that strong.

And then she speaks, and all the weirdness that was in her, all the tension and the alien unfamiliarity, the distance in her voice, the shadows behind her eyes... all the space and pain between them is gone. She’s just Leena, the same Leena that she has always been, the Leena that Claudia knows won’t ever leave her alone, even at such a cost to herself. Leena, even now, her only constant.

“Yes, Claudia,” she says, and the sincerity burns white-hot. “I’m okay with that.”

\---


	5. The Fabric Holding Us Together

\---

Things mostly settle down between them after that.

It still isn’t exactly what Claudia would call ‘normal’... but then, things have never really been normal between them, even when there wasn’t any reason for them not to be. In fact, so far as she’s aware, nothing in her life at all has ever been normal. It’s just the nature of who she is and what she does, the nature of the world around her. Normalcy just isn’t a thing that’s ever going to happen.

Still, at leas for her and Leena, it’s as close to it as they’ve ever had, and Claudia is grateful.

She stays away from Leena’s bedroom, like she’s been told to, and especially at night. She still misses it, still aches for that intimacy with every part of her (and worse, though she’ll never admit it, she still feels her body flare with rising heat whenever they’re in the same room), but she respects the barriers that have been put up, and understands why they’re there... and, regardless of anything else, she simply doesn’t want to make Leena hurt for the things her heart can’t have. Claudia knows that feeling all too well, the pain of wanting, and she will not let herself make that worse for someone who already carries so much of it on her shoulders.

So, instead, she keeps going back to the Warehouse when she can’t sleep. Keeps working on her projects, the Tesla thing and all the countless other little issues that need fixing and upgrading around the place, until the whole Warehouse is practically unrecognisable with all the stuff that suddenly miraculously works.

It’s two or three nights later that Leena finds her there, and it’s by pure coincidence. Claudia is in the same aisle she always is, the one where she’s least likely to be discovered by Artie, and she’s poring over the Tesla schematics for about the forty-six thousandth time and fumbling with little bits of tech that she’s harvested from other pieces of disused machinery. She’s trying to get a handle on how to put all the stuff together, to shape the scattered scraps of circuitry into something vaguely prototype-ish.

Leena, meanwhile, just happens to be shelving something. Or well, that’s her story, anyway; Claudia kind of doubts the veracity of it, but calling her on it won’t do either of them any good, and it’ll risk the almost-normalcy they’ve built back up. And so, though it’s in her nature to be argumentative and contrary (even when unprovoked), she bites her tongue and takes the claim at face value.

“Does Artie know you’re doing that?” Leena asks, and Claudia can hear the amusement in her voice, the laugh-stifling lilt that says she already knows the answer.

Claudia doesn’t glance up; she’s in the middle of trying to work her way around a tricky conundrum, and the interruption isn’t helping her to get there. “He knows I’m doing _stuff_...” she replies evasively. “He doesn’t need to know exactly what that stuff entails, right?”

Leena laughs out loud, and crouches gingerly beside her; Claudia can feel the warmth as she leans in to study the prints, and wills herself to focus on what she needs to focus on and not what she doesn’t.

“That’s pretty impressive,” Leena tells her, and Claudia has to fight down the kind of heat that says she really needs to work a whole lot harder at this ‘focusing’ dealio.

“Nah, dude, it’s so totally not.” She’s not being modest about that; it’s actually not. “If it was, I’d’ve figured out how to get over this stupid hiccup.” She gestures at the plans, kind of deliberately vague, and points at a particular corner of the circuit. “I can’t get this little bit to shrink down far enough for what I’m trying to...”

She trails off, because her project is kind of top-secret and she doesn’t want anyone – not even Leena – to know about it until it’s actually finished. Assuming it can be done at all, of course, which she’s kind of starting to doubt by this point.

“Hm.”

Leena’s studying the Tesla plans now, pretending like she has even the faintest idea of what the hell she’s looking at; her face is all scrunched up and thoughtful, and it’s kind of adorable but mostly just really ridiculously hilarious. She looks kind of like a rabbit trying to engage the oncoming traffic in philosophical debate, but Claudia doesn’t have the heart to point out the fact that she’s so obviously out of her element. 

“Take it easy,” she says instead (and, okay, so maybe she’s smirking just a little bit, but damn if it doesn’t feel good). “Don’t give yourself, like, brain-freeze or something...”

Leena shoots her a Look so potent that Mrs F. herself would have been proud.

“You know,” she murmurs, ‘thoughtfully’. “If you could just redirect the current from here—” She points at the plans, running a perfectly-manicured finger along the circuit to demonstrate. “—to here, you could probably replace that resistor with a smaller one, and save space that way.” She grins, all feigned innocence and coolness and so blatantly proud of herself. “Would that be any good for you?”

Claudia stares. Then blinks. Then stares some more.

Then, in the split-second before her brain catches up with the rest of her and reminds it why it really needs to keep its mouth shut, she hears her own voice blurting out, “...oh my God, take me now.”

It hits her like a ten-tonne truck, about half a second later, exactly why she’s just made a horrible mistake (or, more accurately, _yet another_ horrible mistake), and once the realisation strikes, there’s no stopping it. She replays it over and over again in her mind, everything that has been so messed up between them, all the feelings that neither of them are allowed to think about or talk about or even acknowledge at all, all the ways that she’s just managed to completely screw up what fragment of almost-normalcy they’d just about got going. It’s a train-wreck, a disaster, and all she can do is whimper and stutter out a shamefaced apology and hope that Leena doesn’t go right back to hating her.

But, of course, because she’s Leena, she doesn’t. She doesn’t even flinch, barely even reacts at all. She just leans in, pats Claudia gently on the shoulder, and flashes the kind of self-satisfied smirk that really ought to be illegal.

“Believe me,” she deadpans in a low whisper, “you couldn’t handle it.”

Then, before Claudia can figure out whether she actually heard that or just imagined it, she’s sweeping back to her feet and sashaying away down the corridor, all grace and perfection, throwing an innocuous little wave and an equally innocuous “glad I could help...” over her shoulder as she goes.

Claudia gawps after her, all open-mouthed and slack-jawed.

“Is it hot in here,” she squeaks to herself, “or is it just her?”

It takes a few long minutes for her brain to stop short-circuiting and acknowledge the moment for what it actually was – an offer of reassurance. A ridiculously weird offer, sure, and a ridiculously weird kind of ‘reassurance’, too... but then, pretty much everything Leena does is ridiculously weird anyway, so the whole thing kind of fits in pretty neatly with who she is and who they are and what this is.

(Or, uh, isn’t. Or whatever.)

In short, it’s her way of telling Claudia that she really is okay with all of this. She’s saying, in her usual unhelpful way, that Claudia doesn’t have to tiptoe around all the issues that aren’t supposed to exist (because, yeah, fact is, they so completely do exist, and not least of all in the parts of Claudia that are still running like a furnace right now), or walk on eggshells around her. She’s basically saying that Claudia can still be the same awkward, clumsy, foot-in-mouth freakazoid that she’s always been, that she can keep right on saying stupid things at stupid moments just like she always has, and that, even if she comes out with the kind of crap she just did, then that’s okay.

It’s entirely possible (probable, even) that there’s a better way of saying it than the one she’s picked – a way, for example, that doesn’t involve sudden thoughts of cold showers on Claudia’s part – but, even if there is, Claudia doesn’t particularly care. She gets it, and that’s all that matters.

They may not be completely okay, at least not just yet, but they’re definitely getting there, the misshapen pieces slowly but surely stitching themselves back into something recognisable... and, at least as much as they’ve ever been able to use the word (which, yeah, isn’t really very much at all), they’re on their way back to...

...okay, fine. Yeah, she’ll say it. They’re on their way back to _normal_.

As if on cue (because her karma really does suck sometimes), a klaxon rings out from somewhere a couple of aisles down, and, seemingly in response, Claudia’s entire collection of carefully-harvested components starts to flash and spark and... and, well, generally behave in a way that disused electronic parts really shouldn’t behave.

_Yep..._ she thinks with a sigh, as a pair of burnt-out LEDs start bouncing around like jumping beans. _Normal_.

\---

Artie is sticking hard and fast and stubbornly to his cries of _“you’re grounded!”_ ; point of fact, he’s as ruthless as ever, and takes great pride in repeating all his reasons over and over again every time Claudia gets within fifty feet of him. And, yeah, it’s annoying... but way more so is the way that, as a result of this, she never gets to find out what the klaxon was whining about.

What she does get, however, is the Warehouse to herself for a couple of days while Pete and Artie rush halfway across the world (or possibly the state; it’s not like she was really listening) to go and deal with... well, whatever it is.

Unexpectedly, she discovers that she’s so pumped about having the opportunity to work on her projects without risk of interruption that she (mostly) forgets to freak the hell out about their safety, or panic at the idea that they might not be coming back, or get very scared at all. She actually feels pretty good, at least for the most part, and as she settles happily back in front of her precious Tesla plans, she can’t help thinking that it’s kind of a credit to how far she’s come in these past few days. She’s anxious, yeah, but not terrified. It’s a pretty huge step.

Clearly, she’s evolving as a person, and she can’t help feeling a little proud of herself for it.

Leena takes a more-than-passing interest in what she’s doing (as much out of genuine curiosity, Claudia can tell, as from a desire to keep tabs on her emotional state), and Claudia is secretly kind of grateful for the easy comfortableness that comes so readily with working on this sort of stuff. It’s one of the things Claudia loves most about playing around inside the guts of machinery; it shunts aside everything else, all the outside world and everything in it, and drives her to focus on something that’s solid and tangible, something with results she can see.

Naturally predisposed to be helpful, Leena is mostly content to just do what she’s told, and, though Claudia generally prefers working by herself, she finds that in this particular case she doesn’t really mind having an extra pair of hands.

...at least, for as long as Leena promises to keep the dirty tech talk to a minimum. Claudia may be focused on her precious project right now, and not the thrumming of her body, but she’s still human.

Regardless of any of that, though, throwing aside all the tech stuff and getting right down to the heart and soul and guts of the thing... it’s really just all kinds of awesome to just hang out, the two of them, together, in a situation that doesn’t involve floods of tears.

The upshot of all their hard work (or, to be more precise, the upshot of Claudia’s hard work and Leena’s tool-passing skills and occasional off-hand suggestions in very carefully-chosen language) is that, by the time Artie finally gives in and reneges on his insistences that she’s grounded, the Claudia Donovan Tesla Grenade is just about ready for its maiden flight.

As it turns out, the only reason he’s un-grounding her in the first place is because their latest mission is one that fits exactly into her – admittedly limited – field of expertise. As a matter of fact (and what an epically awesome fact it is), this time they’re after Jimi Hendrix’s guitar, and there’s no way in hell that Artie doesn’t realise she’ll torture him for the rest of both their lives if he doesn’t let her tag along. So, because he’s not quite so heartless and cruel as he likes to pretend to be, he caves in.

“Just this once,” he insists, though neither of them are stupid enough to believe that.

\---

Naturally, the mission goes off without a hitch.

It’s kind of way beyond awesome, actually. Not only does Claudia get to show off her new toy, but she gets to save the day, too. Because, obviously, nothing is ever straightforward, even when it totally should be, and of course some dumbass has decided to accidentally set off the artefact and nearly blast half of Jersey City to smithereens before they have a chance to get to it... and (well, _duh_!) of course Claudia is the only one of them who has any idea how to use a tremolo bar at all, much less at the level needed for this particular almost-catastrophe.

It’s a raging success (and, dude, she totally gets to freakin’ play Hendrix’s guitar, which has got to be the most epic job perk in the history of everything ever), and it completely negates her previous Pete-slash-Tesla-shaped misstep. So much so that even she forgets about it, the guilt that’s been eating at her shunted completely aside in deference to a – much deserved – victory dance that lasts for the entire duration of the journey home.

Even Artie is impressed, and that’s really saying something. In fact, he’s so freakin’ impressed that he doesn’t even say anything about the teeny tiny little issue where she kinda sorta maybe possibly kept playing with the Tesla schematics even after he expressly told her not to. And that... God, that means more to her than she’ll ever let him know.

So, yeah. In brief? _‘Hell to the yeah, baby!’_ , and Claudia is feeling pretty damn invulnerable by the time they get back to the Warehouse.

The good feeling doesn’t last very long, of course, but she’s not really expecting it to. At the very least, it’s not her fault this time, and that has to count for something, easing the unexpected emotion that rises up in her when Artie announces his latest big plan.

Apparently, the old geezer has his eye on the ATF seeker-of-truth freakoid, the goody-goody lameass who caught them at the scene of the not-crime (like they really need another annoying ‘individual’ who can see into people’s souls around here, she muses pointedly), and Pete is really, really not cool at all with the idea of getting a new partner.

If she’s completely honest about it, Claudia isn’t exactly super-happy-funtimes about the whole thing herself; she’s got nothing personal against the dude, notwithstanding the fact that someone clearly shoved a stick up his ass when he was born, but Myka hasn’t really been gone _that_ long, and it is way (way, way!) too freaking early to start throwing around words like _‘new guy’_ and _‘replacement’_.

Of course, their combined stubbornness only serves to make Artie more stubborn in turn, and it looks like Newbie McStickUpHisAss is here to stay (at least for the time being) because he’s off saving the world with Pete right now, and Claudia is stuck in the Warehouse with Leena, listening to Artie as he rambles on and on and on about the Good Old Days (in Ancient Greece), and trying not to get hit by lightning.

It is so totally the opposite of fair.

\---

So, obviously, because they’re Warehouse 13 and they are nothing if not predictable, even on their off-days, the world gets saved (which is awesome), and nobody gets hit by lightning (which, at least as far as Claudia is concerned, is really kind of the bigger deal here), and everything is pretty much back to the way it was by the time the sun goes down.

Right now, Pete’s wandering around the Warehouse somewhere with McNewbie, bonding with him or trying to surreptitiously lose him in the Dark Vault or something equally fun, and Artie’s squirreled himself away someplace ‘quiet’ to write up his report on the whole Ancient Greek Domestic Drama Debacle (as Claudia has decided it should be dubbed, now that it’s safely dealt with and no longer a risk to their collective lives). This, naturally, leaves her and Leena. Together. On their own. Again.

“So, uh, hey...”

It’s a pretty awkward start, but at least this time it’s kind of mostly intentional. She’s making a deliberate point, consciously giving Leena the opportunity to pre-empt what she’s going to try and say, a chance to turn around and leave if she wants to, or else just change the subject entirely before they’re in too deep to back out.

Basically, it’s a poorly-executed (but well-intentioned, she’d like to think) shot at saying _‘I’m about to start talking about that thing we’re not supposed to ever talk about again’_ , and she takes a great deal of comfort in knowing that Leena will recognise it as such... and, when she doesn’t interrupt or change the subject or do any of those other things she could so easily do, it’s a huge relief to know that it definitely means _‘okay, go ahead’_.

“Look...” She exhales shakily, and wets her lips. “Look, uh... I don’t wanna... y’know, I know we’re both kind of past making a thing outta this stuff, but... look, Leena, I just... I...” She closes her eyes for a moment, tries to steady herself, then just dives right the hell in. “I really don’t know what I would’ve done without you these last few weeks, okay?”

She’s talking so fast that it’s basically all coming out as a single long syllable, and Leena looks like she’s really struggling to pick apart the individual words, much less make actual sense of them. Claudia kind of wants to give her a moment to catch up, but she knows all too well that, if she stops even for just a second, she’ll be screwed, and so she rushes on, every bit as fast and even more breathless.

“...and, uh, okay... I know... I get that it’s probably been hard for you... I mean, I get that I’ve kinda _made_ it hard for you, what with me being a colossal spaz, and apparently a horn dog, and all, but...” She sighs. “But you stuck with me. Y’know? You didn’t quit on me, even though you so totally could have and I so totally wouldn’t have blamed you one little bit. I really, really wouldn’t have, dude, and... and you gotta know that. But, like, you didn’t. Even though you could have. And you... you didn’t let stuff get weird... like, not even a little bit weird, not even pseudo-weird, and you... you just...” She shakes her head, gasping (rather more for air than from emotion). “You’re freakin’ amazing, Leena. Like, beyond epic, even. And that... that’s not me trying to, like, get into your pants or anything, I swear. It’s just... y’know... it’s just me saying... y’know, _thanks_.”

Leena’s smile is almost brighter than Claudia’s ever seen it, and that’s a pretty impressive achievement. “You’re welcome, Claudia.”

It’s not very much of an acknowledgement, really, given that Claudia’s just poured out her heart and soul, but it’s soft and it’s simple and it’s sincere... and somehow, when it comes from Leena, three words somehow manage to say so much more than thirty from anyone else. She can touch the deepest parts Claudia has in her, with barely any effort at all and even fewer words. It’s so breathtaking, so phenomenal that Claudia finds it renders her speechless too.

They’re hugging, then, and Claudia is at least mostly sure that she’s the one who started it, but it’s kind of hard to believe that when Leena’s the one who is holding her like that, arms wrapped around her so tight that it’s almost like she’s scared to let her go, delicate hands tracing fragile patterns across the planes and arch of her back. It’s a tender moment, a gentle touch, but at the same time it’s really quite inescapably protective, skirting the edges of actually possessive, and Claudia can’t help imagining it’s almost like she’s trying to _claim_ her.

The idea should sicken her. Claudia has always been fiercely independent, desperate for some kind of control over some tiny part of a life that has been so thoroughly brutalised and abused by so many things beyond her understanding. She doesn’t even care which part, really, or how big it is; all she knows is that it’s the only way she’s ever been able to keep a hold on her own existence.

She fights like a wild thing – she knows she does – against all forms of control, however they manifest themselves, from every corner of this twisted-up universe that loves so much to make her suffer. She’s always been resistant to authority, rebelling with actual violence against anyone who dares to try and exert any kind of power over her, and the mere thought of being claimed – of having her life put into someone else’s hands again, after everything that’s happened to her – has always been fundamentally terrifying.

It’s a very fine line, she knows – the fear of being manipulated and abused waging a near-constant war against the fear of being left alone to throw herself into the abyss – but it’s a struggle that she’s dealt with her whole life. She’s always managed to toe that line, to walk it carefully, to keep the people she trusts just close enough for them to pull her back if she falls, but not so close that they can push her around. No. She’s lived through enough of that, and has always sworn she’d never go back. Even if it kills her to resist it, she won’t let herself be taken.

And yet, she realises, if that’s what Leena’s doing here – laying claim to her and marking her as her own, taking her even in this weird and intangible way – she won’t mind it. Oh, she won’t, like, take orders or anything... but she can’t help thinking that the idea of belonging to her, even if it is just like this, even if the only way it can happen is in the form of a wordless promise of protection... well, it’s not such a terrible notion.

Truthfully? Instead of scaring her like she expects it to, she finds that it actually kind of tempers some of the fear that’s always rippling so close to the surface. If that really is what’s happening here, if the skimming patterns of Leena’s fingers across her back really are a coded mark of possession, of promise, then it means she doesn’t have to be afraid. It means that Leena really and truly won’t let her be alone. It means that she has a home, and a permanent one, that she’ll always be able to find sanctuary in those arms, even if she screws it up again (and again and again and again), even if she does something worse, even if she falls completely.

It means that, even if she scares away the rest of the world, she won’t scare Leena.

They stop hugging, then, because they have work to do... and also, in all honesty, because it’s kind of reaching that awkward point where they’re pretty much just standing there and feeling uncomfortable, so pulling away is probably the best option at this point. There’s nothing more that either one of them can say or do now, anyway. It is what it is, no more and no less, and moving on from it really is the safest (and probably the only) option for them both.

Well, sort of. Claudia still can’t help testing the waters, because it’s just in her nature to push the limits of everything she comes into contact with. And maybe that’s just one more way she has of holding onto her own existence, that sense of perpetual challenge, of being unable to let things lie, and maybe it’s just as telling of how completely Leena gets her – the way that she never shies away from those moments when they come – as it is of Claudia’s troubled psyche that she pushes them so hard and so often.

She times it carefully. Waits for Leena to start moving again, then draws up level with her, and uses the fact that they’re navigating less-than straightforward corridors as an excuse to not quite meet her eyes as she asks, in her most hopefully plaintive voice, “So... about my aura...”

It works. Leena’s not nearly so evasive about it this time, and if there was ever a sign that things really are back to normal between them, there it is, right there. She actually seems almost okay with the subject (at least, relatively speaking), so much more comfortable now that things have settled between them, and so Claudia pushes her a little harder than she usually would; she’s still genuinely curious about this stuff, and Leena is so easy right now, and she kind of figures this will probably be her best shot at getting an actual answer out of her (instead of some annoyingly cryptic gibberish). And, regardless of anything else, it’s conversation; it’s cool and it’s casual, and it washes away the lingering remains of the moment they’ve just had, and that’s reason enough to keep it going.

Apparently it’s still a complicated subject, though, because Leena’s still sort of trying to hide behind her vague descriptors – _“it’s not that simple, Claudia”_ or _“it’s difficult to explain”_. She’s weirdly clumsy about it this time, though, using Claudia’s own (admittedly made-up) terminology instead of her usual poetical nonsense. It’s like she’s caving in a little bit, like, if Claudia can just hit the right phrase at the right moment, she’ll crack right open and let all of her secrets fall out...

...and she’s so busy pushing her for it, and Leena is so busy trying to push right back that they’re both kind of distracted and completely preoccupied as they turn the corner into Artie’s office, and...

...and there she is, ethereal and impossible, and Claudia can barely breathe for how beautiful she is.

It’s Myka, and she’s come home.

\---

“I can’t believe it’s really you.”

Myka laughs. It’s a wonderful sound. “You’ve said that eight times already, Claud.”

“I know, I know.” She sounds like the very worst kind of flailing fangirl, and she knows it, but she just can’t stop herself. “I just... God, Myka, I can’t believe it’s really _you_.”

“Okay,” Myka chuckles. “Okay, Claud.”

They’re sitting outside the B&B, just the two of them, soaking up the lingering warmth as evening starts to creep up on the dwindling afternoon. Myka has barely even been back more than a couple of hours, and yet here she is, choosing to hang out with Claudia instead of doing any of the seventy-seven thousand other things they both know she could be doing. She could be getting unpacked, catching up with Pete or Artie, out in the field already, anything. She could be doing anything in the whole freakin’ world, and not one of them would have tried to stop her, but she’s not. The whole Warehouse is at her feet right now, and yet she’s here, with Claudia, just hanging out at the B&B like they have all the time in the world, just shooting the breeze and doing not very much at all.

Claudia genuinely believes that, if there is such a thing as Heaven, this is the closest to it a sinner like her is ever going to get. And, right at this moment, she is so totally fine with that.

She can’t take her eyes off Myka, and part of her knows that she’s kind of staring a bit (or, well, probably more like a lot), but she just can’t help herself. She’s here. She’s really and truly here... like, sitting there right in front of her, sipping lemonade and laughing and smiling, right here in the flesh. _Here_. It’s a lot to take in, and Claudia’s probably not doing the best job in the world of playing it cool, but really, she’d like to think she can’t exactly be blamed for that. Not after everything that’s gone down, all the terrible, stupid things she’s done, all the stuff she’s felt, all the pain that’s carved through her and beaten out a path to this moment. She deserves this, she thinks. For just a few breathtaking minutes, she’s earned the right to just sit here and stare.

“You look older,” Myka tells her.

She looks thoughtful, like she’s not quite sure whether that’s a good thing or not, and Claudia feels herself flush a little. In truth, she’s not entirely sure either. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.” Myka’s smile dims a little; it’s almost imperceptible, but Claudia notices it just the same, watching with guarded worry as her eyes lose a touch of their light. “Not a lot. But a little, yeah.”

She reaches out, pushes the hair out of Claudia’s eyes, and gently tilts her face up. Claudia twitches uncomfortably under the scrutiny, but bites down on the impulse to wriggle free. She’s been without a chance for this kind of contact for way too long; she’s not going to let herself run away from it now that it’s presented itself, just because running away is her primary reflex.

“In a bad way?” she asks shyly.

Myka shrugs, all forced ambivalence and contemplation, and that’s the answer right there. “A little rougher around the edges, I guess,” she replies.

“Yeah...” Claudia mumbles.

She doesn’t want to admit to the cause of it, if it’s true; she doesn’t want to accept the fact of it by voicing it out loud – that Myka not being here is what has made her this way – but Myka is smart, and there’s never been any point in trying to fake anything around her. She’ll always see through it and, even when she’s not so great at actually dealing with the problem, she’ll always get that there is one. So, no, Claudia doesn’t try to hide it, and she doesn’t try to lie about it either. She just squares her shoulders, sucks it up, and admits.

“It’s... it’s not been easy.”

What remains of the smile falls from Myka’s face; her hand lingers just beneath Claudia’s jaw, lightly tickling, but the tension in her fingers is sharp and painful. “I’m sorry, Claud.”

“Don’t be.” She surprises herself by actually meaning it. “We get it, dude. We get why you did what you did. Nobody’s pissed at you for...” She trails off, then shrugs. “Well, I dunno, maybe Pete. A little. Maybe. But y’know, he’s a big baby when anyone does anything he doesn’t like, and you know how he loves to sulk anyway... and...”

“Yeah,” Myka sighs.

“But he’ll get over it,” Claudia insists. Myka doesn’t look convinced, though, so she pushes the point as hard as she can, because she would do anything to see that sorrow lift itself from her eyes. “He _will_ , Myka. He’s just gotta get used to the idea that you’re... y’know, that you’re back... that you’re here, y’know, and you’re not... you’re not gonna go away again any time soon.”

Myka sighs again, nods and turns her gaze away. Claudia bites her lip, feeling awkward and anxious; she’s never been very good at comforting others, always too clumsy, too prone to trip over her own tongue, and she sort of wishes that she could run inside and bring out Leena, that she could show her off, get her to chase that ghost of sadness away from Myka’s face just like she did with so much of Claudia’s own pain.

But then, at the same time, she wants to keep Leena for herself. And, honestly (right now, probably more even than that), she kind of really wants to keep Myka for herself, too. At least, for the time being. It’s been way too long, and she’s missed her way too much, and suddenly she doesn’t care how sad Myka is or how much better Leena could make her feel – how much better than Claudia she is at this sort of stuff – because right now it’s Claudia who has her. It’s Claudia that she chose to hang with, and Claudia is not ready to share her just yet.

Myka takes a deep breath, and stares out at the dusk-touched horizon; Claudia wonders if she’s missed the view, too. “I got your messages, Claud.”

Claudia makes a small noise in the back of her throat; she really hopes it doesn’t sound as much like choking as it feels. “Oh God.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t...” Myka starts, but trails off almost instantly, like she’s willing herself not to feel what she is so obviously feeling already. “...I’m sorry you were alone.”

“I wasn’t alone,” Claudia blurts out; it’s instinctive, but it’s also true. “I was just...” She’s really kind of glad that Myka isn’t facing her right now, because she’s not entirely sure that she could deal with the look on her face if it was staring directly at her. “I was just... I dunno... I was just lonely, I guess.” The admission comes very quietly, like feeling that way is something to be ashamed of. “And stupid. Like, really, really frackin’ stupid.”

Myka chuckles, real warmth shining through the sound and throwing her sorrow into the shadows, if only for a moment or two.

“So I heard...” she remarks, and it’s pretty clear from the tone of her voice that she’s only going to make a big deal out of this if Claudia allows it. Still, it’s enough to bring the lightness back, for them both, and Claudia is weirdly kind of grateful for the humiliation that crashes down over her as Myka goes on, “You did _what_ to Pete?”

Claudia buries her face in her hands and whimpers. “Oh my God...”

Myka leans forwards, resting her elbows lightly on her knees. The brightness is definitely back in her eyes now, like it never left at all, and it’s almost worth the blow to Claudia’s ego (as if she really needs any more help in that department) to see her so confidently cheerful again. She’ll totally take one for the team – hell, she’ll take a hundred – if that’s what it takes to keep Myka smiling.

“Tell me everything,” she demands.

And so, because she wants to keep her smiling, even at the cost of her own integrity (what little of it might somehow still miraculously exist), Claudia does.

Well, she tells her everything about _Pete_ , anyway – about the Tesla, and her project, and how she was so busy squeeing over the opportunity to actually have one in her hands that she forgot to keep watch like she was supposed to, and how she freaked out when they got made and shot Pete instead of the dude she was aiming at, and how she got grounded for the rest of her life... and then, in a futile bid at distracting Myka from all that other humiliating stuff, about how Artie reneged on that for the sake of Jimi Hendrix and how indescribably kickass that was. She gives all the awful, horrible, gory details, and watches Myka’s mouth twitch as she desperately tries not to laugh.

“He wasn’t even pissed or anything,” she grumbles as a finishing point, like that somehow excuses the whole thing. “He thought it was funny.”

And, okay, so maybe that part isn't exactly true, but she’s pretty sure it would have been if Pete hadn’t still been sulking at the time. She really, really doesn’t want Myka to know about that part, though; she doesn’t want to see the light inevitably go out on her face again when she realises that he wasn’t amused at all, that he was exactly the opposite, in fact, that he was simply too depressed to care. She wants Myka to think of him as just Pete, the same Pete that he’s always been, to think that he didn’t care because that’s just who he is, because he’s the dumbass who gets hit by so much random crap in the average day that getting accidentally Tesla’d by a junior agent really would be just another silly joke to him. She needs her to think of him like that, to shape that picture in her mind, because that’s the only way she knows the smile will stay, and she can’t face losing it so soon after it’s come back.

She’s pretty sure that Myka sees right through the lie, right into the heart of what she’s trying to hide, but she’s smart enough (or possibly just thankful enough, it’s hard to tell) not to say anything about it.

Instead, she just says, “We really need to get you some proper training,” and Claudia swears that the whole world lights up like a freaking fourth-of-July firecracker at the thought.

“Well, you’re back now...” she reminds her, trying to sound like she’s trying not to sound as hopeful as she (secretly wants Myka to know that she) actually is. “You could maybe, I dunno, like, whip me into shape. Or, y’know, something. Y’know, if you, like, feel like it. Maybe. Uh.”

Myka’s actually kind of beaming now, as bright as the setting sun and every bit as warm, too. “I could, couldn’t I?” she smiles, and gives Claudia’s shoulder a light squeeze. “I could probably use a refresher course myself, anyway. You know, I’ve been out of practice for a while...”

It’s the best offer Claudia’s had since _‘do you want to play Jimi Hendrix’s guitar?’_ , and she can’t keep the grin off her face.

Myka can clearly see the excitement starting to run away with her, though, and apparently she’s not changed very much at all in the time that she’s been away, because she’s still so totally Myka about everything. Claudia hasn’t even said a word (and she sure as hell hasn’t voiced her enthusiasm aloud), but even so, already Myka’s getting all serious and sober and _“Please remember to take it seriously, Claud, this is important stuff, we’re not on vacation, you know”,_ and it’s almost like she never left at all, it’s all so effortless and simple and Myka, and...

...and Claudia knows that it’s a valid point, that there really is an actual point to this, that it really isn’t just for fun, but she’s so delirious with joy right now that all she can do is laugh until she cries.

\---

Ever the expert in awful timing, Myka waits until the precise second that Claudia lines up her first shot before saying, all casual and innocent, “So, about Leena...”

It’s hard to tell which is more disastrously noisy after that – the half-dozen artefacts or more that go clattering in all directions as the wayward arc of electricity hits their shelf, or Claudia’s horrified and somewhat less-than-muffled shriek.

(It’s also kind of hard to tell whether the shriek is more of a response to the accident or the question, but she’s rather hoping Myka doesn’t ask about that.)

“Whoa!” Myka manages, once the ruckus has mostly died down, and her saucer-wide eyes are darting from the shelf to Claudia’s face and back again like she’s watching a tennis match. “It was just a question, Claud...”

Claudia groans and sinks down to her knees, dropping the Tesla and cradling her head in her hands. “Oh my God, did you really _have_ to do that?!”

“Most important rule of target practice,” Myka replies smoothly, like she’s just done her some kind of epic favour by making her nuke half the corridor (and, with it, what tiny fragment of dignity she might have still had). “Stay focused at all times.”

Using pretty much every ounce of self-control she has (because, annoying and embarrassing as it is, it’s probably a valid point), Claudia swallows down the bitchy retort on her tongue.

“You’re such a positive mentor,” she grumbles instead, and raises her head to watch the fruits of her dance with catastrophe as Myka sets to work putting all of the displaced artefacts back in their proper places on the shelf (still in one miraculous piece, at least for the time being, even after its brush with Claudiation).

“I’m not your mentor,” Myka reminds her, very quietly.

Claudia bites her lip, feeling like she’s inadvertently crossed a line or something, and automatically flounders to make it right. “Oh. _Oh_. No, I mean... y’know, I mean... y’know, I know that. I didn’t, err, y’know, it wasn’t... I wasn’t, like... uh... I didn’t mean, like, literally, or anything, I was just—”

“Claud.” She’s still smiling, which is a good sign, though now the look on her face has kind of reshaped itself into that annoying ‘amused but fond’ thing that she gets going whenever she has to step in and stop Claudia from making an idiot out of herself (which is often, and that look on her face never fails to be irritating). “I know what you mean, Claud. Don’t give yourself an aneurysm over it.”

“Oh.” The temptation to hide her face all over again is almost overwhelming. “Oh. Uh, yeah. Of course. Uh.”

Myka chuckles, but refuses to let her drag herself down into yet another spiral of self-destructive mumbling. “Anyway. You’re evading the issue.”

“What? The issue of me being a total spaz who can’t hit a target even when it’s five feet away?” Claudia shoots back sulkily. “That issue? ’Cause, dude, Myka... pretty sure we just covered that.”

Myka’s not about to be deterred so easily, though, much to Claudia’s aggravation. “The _other_ issue, Claud...”

Claudia lets out a hopeless little sound. “I don’t see any ‘other issue’...” She makes a big show of looking up and down the corridor, like she actually believes that will miraculously deter Myka from this doomed and painful interrogation. “Nope. No issue round here. No issue at all, and... oh, hey, isn’t it your turn to shoot now?”

Myka puts her hands on her hips, mock-stern. “Claudia...”

She really, really hates it when Myka tries to use her full name. But she’s still a kid at heart, and Myka has a way of bringing that out in her in a way that nobody else – not even Artie – quite does. So, of course, she crosses her arms and pouts and glares and generally kicks up a big scowly fuss. “Oh my God, Myka, what!?”

Myka smiles, like she knows she’s got her. “Leena,” she says, one brow quirked and her hip cocked to one side. “Something about you ‘jumping her bones’?”

Claudia whimpers, loud and miserable and pathetic, and hides her flaming face behind her hair. “Do we really have to?”

For a moment or two, Myka just studies her thoughtfully. “Not if you don’t want to,” she says slowly, after a very long pause; she sounds serious, but only as much as she absolutely has to. “But you’re the one who phoned me, Claud...”

Claudia grunts. “Yeah, well. I think we just established the part where I’m a colossal spaz who doesn’t exactly think before she starts punching buttons.”

Myka finishes replacing all the artefacts, and goes back to her side, crouching beside her and touching her arm. “We don’t have to talk about it if you really don’t want to,” she says, a little closer to actual seriousness this time. “And, whatever it was, it looks like you’ve both put it behind you now, so maybe it doesn’t matter. But if you do want to unburden...” Her hand tightens, like she wants to offer support, but she’s too... well, too _Myka_ to really know how that works. (Claudia so totally relates.) “Well. You know.”

Claudia groans, and takes a deep breath. She can’t exactly keep it quiet now, can she? “I jumped her.”

“I got that much,” Myka smiles, not unkindly.

Claudia shakes her head, whining pitifully. She really doesn’t want to have to think about this stuff, not now that she and Leena have finally moved past it... but then, she supposes that this is probably some kind of hubris for being dumb enough to voicemail Myka (twice!) in the first place. She’s only got herself to blame for being in this place, so she sucks it up and takes it as a lesson for next time.

And besides, this is Myka, and the thought of letting her down by not following through on this crap is almost more excruciating than imagining the look on her face when she hears it.

“It’s so totally not a big thing,” she insists, quiet but as pointed as she can muster. “Leena was just... she was just there. Y’know? Like, you’d gone away, and Artie was hurt, and Pete was being Pete, and everything was all shot to hell, and she... and she was there. She was just _there_ , and I...” She swallows hard; she knows that this is going hurt them both, that it will cut deep and clean and sharp, and make Myka get that sad look on her face all over again, but she will not hide from it. It is what it is, even the worst of it. “...I didn’t have anyone else.”

And there it is, predictable and painful, and Myka is suddenly looking melancholy, sorrowful and apologetic, like it’s really hitting her for the first time now, just how completely her decision affected the ones she left behind. Like she’s finally starting to understand the way that the circuit stopped working once her component was taken out from it. She looks like she wants to say something, most likely to voice her guilt out loud, and that’s pretty much the last thing in the universe that Claudia wants right now; for both of their sakes, she can’t let Myka do that, and so she rushes quickly on before the other woman has a chance to even open her mouth.

“I was stupid, okay? I was needy and stupid, and I just... I thought...”

“Did you, though?” Myka demands; she’s not exactly smiling again, but it’s close, and it’s almost like she can’t help herself. Even feeling as bad she so obviously is, she can’t resist an opening like the one that Claudia has apparently just given her. “Did you really ‘think’, Claud? At all?”

“Okay, fine!” Claudia snaps. She’s irritated and relieved in almost equal measure; the question was clearly unconscious on Myka’s part, a reflex more than an actual sentiment, but it shattered the tension, and things are mostly back to the way they’re supposed to be. “No, Myka, I did _not_ think. I was needy and stupid and I didn’t think at all, and I tried to jump her because she was there and she was hugging me and she smelled really good. Okay? Is that freakin’ better?”

Myka shrugs, honest but good-natured. “Not really. But at least it’s more realistic.”

She’s clearly still feeling bad about leaving (and, okay, Claudia can’t help thinking that maybe she kinda should be, at least for a little while), but she seems to be taking the story for what it is – something that happened, an event that came and went and passed, in the time before she came back. Neither of them can undo what went down, and neither of them can rewrite the last few weeks; it happened, and there’s nothing anyone can do about that, except learn from it and move the hell on.

Myka’s back. That’s the only thing that matters; the rest is all just stupid footnotes that nobody but a book nerd would read anyway.

“So, yeah,” Claudia mumbles, trying to get them back on track with a characteristically awkward segue, distracting Myka from the footnotes with a flourish. “We made out. It was hot.” And, okay, that is so totally not true; it was clumsy and messy and she’s pretty sure she sucked (and not in the good way), but it’s her damn story, and she’ll tell it how she wants. “She won’t let me in her bed now. Which, c’mon, is so totally unfair, ’cause it’s not like we even _did_ anything, right? And...” She trails off, not because she’s uncomfortable sharing all of this with Myka (she doesn’t exactly have a ‘TMI’ button), but because she’s pretty sure she’s blushing way too much now, and she really doesn’t want Myka to think inappropriate things about the inappropriate things she is so totally not thinking. “Anyway, yeah. Whatever. It was, like, five stupid minutes, and we’re cool now anyway. Kinda. Mostly. I think.”

Myka’s mouth splits into a grin; it’s just a little too bright to be fully convincing, but it’s there just the same and it’s at least mostly real, and that’s good enough for Claudia. “My God, Claud...” She huffs an exaggerated sigh. “You really, really need to find some new coping methods.”

“Hey!” She’s not really offended, but it seems like the right role to play, and so she runs with it. “You are so not allowed to judge me. This is what happens when you go away, dude. Stuff like this happens when you’re not here to smack me upside the head and tell me to quit being a dumbass. Okay? This is so completely your fault, Myka, so just...” She swallows; it’s starting to cut a little close to the quick, and her every reflex is crying out to back away from the blade before it goes in, but she kind of needs to say the words, and this is as close to a comfortable opening as she’s ever going to have. “So just... don’t go away again. Okay?”

Myka leans in, bumps their shoulders clumsily together; it’s nothing like a hug, but it’s as close as either of them are going to try for right now. “Okay, Claud.”

“Good,” she says, and she is so not at all even a tiny bit tearful right now. “’Cause stupid people do stupid stuff when you’re not around.”

Myka eyes the shelf that Claudia has just almost decimated, and tilts her head in anticipation as it gives a precarious little wobble. “...and, sometimes,” she muses dryly, “even when I am.”

As the shelf gives up its fight for life and duly collapses, taking the artefacts with it, Claudia decides it’s probably best if she doesn’t try to argue with that just now.

\---

Pete and Newbie McStickUpHisAss are kicking a football around outside the B&B when they get back.

It’s getting pretty dark by now, and the visibility is really sucky, but Myka hangs around anyway, watching the two of them with a delirious little smile on her face. She looks almost quixotic, lost in contemplation, so Claudia leaves her to her thoughts and heads inside by herself.

Leena’s clearing the table, presumably from dinner, but she stops what she’s doing to throw out a friendly wave. “How was target practice?”

Claudia shrugs. “Killed a shelf.”

Leena’s laugh is like music, light and lilting, like a bullet of bliss to Claudia’s symphonic heart. “Honestly, Claudia. I just fixed those a week ago.”

“Yeah, well,” Claudia huffs. “It’ll give you something to do during the day. Y’know, since I’m not grounded any more, you can’t count on me to hang around all day and keep you outta trouble.” Leena quirks an eyebrow, unapologetically bemused, and Claudia rolls her eyes in retaliation. “Dude, you gotta keep yourself entertained somehow, right?”

There’s something almost like a skip in Leena’s step as she balances dishes on her way to the kitchen that Claudia is only just now realising hasn’t been there in a while. “You people keep me busy enough already, thank you very much...” she comments, in a tone of voice that makes it pretty obvious she wouldn’t have it any other way.

“Yeah, right,” Claudia smirks. “You’re just makin’ up excuses to be lazy now.”

They finish clearing the table together, Claudia falling into the role of helper by instinct now, and they’re just about done when Myka floats in, looking nothing short of euphoric.

“Myka!” Leena’s looking a little bit giddy all of a sudden, too, and Claudia can tell that whatever Myka’s aura is saying, it’s all kinds of infectious. “Settling back in okay?”

It’s obvious that she already knows the answer; Claudia sure as hell can’t read auras, but even she can see the joy radiating out from... well, from both of them, actually. Myka’s practically glowing with quiet contentment, and the sentiment is reflected in flawless symmetry on Leena’s face, radiant and so beautiful that it almost hurts. The music-bullet in Claudia’s chest shifts a little bit, and she bites down on unfamiliar emotion, suddenly unable to look at either one of them without feeling the threat of tears.

“Mm,” Myka affirms softly. “It’s good to be back home.”

Her smile widens, if that’s even possible at this point, then turns mischievous in a way that Claudia finds worryingly familiar; she has a sneaking suspicion that she knows exactly where this is going, and she’s almost positive that she’s not going to like it one bit.

“So, Leena...” Myka says. She’s flat-out smirking now, face all lit up with a sly little grin, and Claudia groans; this is so definitely going there, isn’t it? “Claud tells me she took good care of you while I was away...”

(Yes. Yes, it is.)

“Oh, _did_ she?” Leena quirks a brow, but she doesn’t stop smiling. She doesn’t even have the decency to look even the tiniest little bit embarrassed, for the love of whatever, just forty-two flavours of smug. “Well... that’s certainly one way of putting it...”

Claudia, of course, is already beyond mortified. She buries her face in her hands and groans again, a little louder this time, hoping against hope that either one of them will take pity on her and just drop the issue before she literally dies of humiliation. “Guys...” she whines. “Do we really have to talk about this—”

“Yes!” they shoot back, in perfect irritating unison.

Claudia shuts her eyes and tries not to whimper. It’s going to be a very, very long night.

\---

And it is.

Though she should be calm and content now, relaxed in a way that has been eluding her for weeks, sleep doesn’t come any more easily to Claudia tonight than it did when the room across the corridor was empty. Her mind is full up, reeling with irrational thoughts and fears and what-ifs, and she just can’t shake the feeling that, if she even just closes her eyes for a moment, she’ll open them to find herself once more in a world without Myka.

It still feels too much like a dream to risk waking up.

She aches to go in there, to creep into her room like she has so many times before, to drink down Myka’s presence and draw comfort from just being there, the turning of pages, the soft haze of the night-light, the mnemonic sensations that she’s missed so terribly in the weeks since they were ripped away from her... all those things that, for the want of them, drove her to seek out Leena in the first place. She wants to go in there, now that there’s actually a Myka there to go to, to just crawl in and curl up like she used to do when she can’t sleep. She wants it to be like it used to be.

Except, of course, it’s not like it used to be. Not any more. In a thousand tiny ways, it’s different. Subtly but fundamentally, it is so very different, and acting like it’s just another sleepless night – pretending like she’s just plagued by the usual nightmare-forged memories of traumas that, though they’re most definitely real, are so not the issue here and now – would be an insult to them both.

...to all three of them, even.

The thing is, this time she wants more. More than the familiarity of just being in the same room and letting Myka’s presence comfort her, more than the things that she remembers were once enough, more than just to exist in the same space as someone who has faith in her. She wants more than to just curl up at the end of Myka’s bed and wordlessly bask in all the little things that have always brought her so much peace before. She wants Myka to do more than just accept her like she always does by not acknowledging her at all, wants more than the easy silence that’s always worked so well for them until now. She wants contact and connection, words actually spoken out loud for once, proof beyond all possible doubt that Myka is back, and that she is real.

But, of course, she can’t ask for any of that. And, really, she wouldn’t even if she could. Myka isn’t like Leena; she doesn’t give herself freely or readily or easily. In her own way, older and more worldly though she is, in this sort of thing she’s nearly as impossibly awkward as Claudia herself is – neither of them have ever really been able to just Be Supportive without tripping up over their own epic fail. If Claudia goes into her room now, if she asks her for all the things that she wants, if she lets Myka see that she needs her to be this thing that she isn’t, then she’ll scare her away. She might as well be holding the door wide open for her to leave again.

So she doesn’t. She wants to – oh God, she wants to – but she doesn’t.

But, at the same time, she kind of has to do something. It’s late and she’s definitely not sleeping, and every moment that ticks past is a step closer to panic, a heartbeat closer to listening to the voices in her head.

She can’t go back to the Warehouse. Or, well, she probably could, but there wouldn’t be much point to it now; she’s tricked out pretty much everything in the place, and Artie’s kind of told her that he won’t mention the whole ‘messing with the Tesla plans’ thing to Mrs F. if she promises not to touch anything in there for at least a week. And of course she can’t go into Leena’s room, because that’s still off-limits (for reasons of inappropriate sort-of-maybe feelings or whatever)... but, hey, that’s kind of okay this time, because she doesn’t really want to go back there anyway. Because, yeah, the thing she does want is to go into Myka’s room, but her brain won’t stop repeating on a never-ending loop all those reasons why she can’t go in there either.

And so, because she can’t go in (and apparently because her brain is weird), she ends up outside.

She feels like a kid, small and stupid, huddled outside Myka’s door, but there’s just enough give in the walls that she can hear the rustling of pages if she stays completely still, and just enough of a gap underneath the door that a glimmering ghost of orange light just peeks through the crack. It’s not exactly the same as being in there, as being on her bed, in her company – she still can’t see Myka, for all she can see her light – but it’s just enough to keep the demons at bay and her thoughts quiet.

She doesn’t make any noise, doesn’t even take up very much space. She just sits there with her back pressed up against the wall, hugging her knees to her chest and absorbing what little there is to take in from this side of the door. It’s not much, of course, but it’s a whole lot more than she’d get if she was lying in bed and staring up at the ceiling (or, worse, crying) until the sun comes up... so, for what it is, she’ll take it happily.

At the very least, she thinks, if Myka does try to leave, she can’t possibly get out without passing her. And, naturally, the second that she does that, it’s open season for Claudia to tackle her to the ground and hold her there until they can think of a better way to keep her.

Admittedly, it’s not the most feasible plan she’s ever concocted (if she’s completely honest about it, Myka would kick her ass in a nanosecond if she dared to try it), but the that strength she draws even just from thinking about it, playing the imaginary scene out in her head, is immense. If nothing else, there’s no way that Myka can leave again now without Claudia knowing about it, and giving everything she has to try and stop it. And, if even that fails, then, this time, she won’t be able to leave without saying goodbye. It’s a really, really comforting thought.

So much so, in fact, that she actually kind of finds herself drifting off into something that’s almost like sleep every now and then. It’s only for seconds at a time, little fleeting half-moments where her eyes close and her head droops drowsily forward, but even so, it’s probably the closest thing to actual sleep she’s got – at least within the walls of the B&B – for weeks.

The third or maybe the fourth time it happens, she’s jolted out of the delusory half-slumber with a strange kind of violence, disturbed by what sounds like movement just beyond her field of awareness. Her head snaps back up, sharp enough to nearly give her whiplash, and her eyes struggle blearily to focus. She comes back to reality just in time to catch the flurry of fabric as a warm blanket is wrapped around her shoulders, cocooning her.

“...mmmwha?” It’s about the most coherent sound she can manage just now, but that doesn’t matter, because at least it’s something.

And, of course, it’s Leena. And, of course, she always somehow understands just what Claudia’s trying to say, even when she’s too groggy to actually say it with words that make sense to normal human beings.

“You looked like you might be cold,” she explains in a hushed whisper, clearly not wanting to disturb Myka in her room.

Claudia stretches, still a little delirious and unfocused. “Mm,” she mumbles, a bit more coherent. “Mmm, thanks...”

There’s a hand on her shoulder, sliding down her arm, and then the familiar warmth of a body she knows too well (but still not well enough) as Leena settles down effortlessly next to her.

“What’cha doin’?” Claudia hears herself ask, a pseudo-delirious burble of barely-words.

Seemingly without any conscious thought, like she’s done it a hundred times (and, truth be told, the actual number is probably not too far off that by this point), Leena pulls her in close. “Getting comfortable,” she answers simply, and Claudia feels her weighted head droping down onto her shoulder by pure instinct.

She hums, and presses herself right up against Leena’s side, soaking up all warmth and solace she can get from this thing that’s not supposed to be happening. “This doesn’t count, right?” she murmurs, hopelessly hopeful, because she doesn’t want to give this up. “’Cause we’re not, like, in bed? This is okay? We can do this, and it doesn’t count?”

Both of their bodies vibrate as Leena laughs. “That’s right,” she affirms, and it sounds kind of like she’s letting herself indulge her own feelings, just this once, every bit as much as she’s indulging Claudia’s, like she’s doing this as much for herself as for Claudia, and that’s a really, really good feeling. “We can do this. It doesn’t count.”

Claudia smiles. “Good.”

From inside the room, she can hear the familiar cadence of Myka’s voice as she talks softly to herself. She’s probably just voicing her own inner monologue about whatever book she’s no doubt reading, but to Claudia, distorted beyond comprehension as the words are by the door and the wall and her own half-asleep delirium, they sound so much like promises that her heart almost stops.

“She’s gonna stay,” she murmurs. “We’re gonna keep her this time.”

Leena makes a small noise against the top of her head. “Yes,” she replies, voice still little more than a whisper. “She’s going to stay.”

She shifts, just a little, and Claudia can feel the heat of her gaze; without even glancing up, she can tell that Leena’s watching her, and she tries to squirm out of view, but all of her limbs are so very heavy and she’s just far too comfortable to even think about moving at all. Leena’s fingers are gentle, trailing through her hair, and the sensation is so perfect, so intoxicating, that Claudia lets her eyes slide closed.

“Go to sleep, Claudia.”

“Mm.” Reflexively, she burrows further into the cocoon of blankets (and, by proxy, further into Leena’s side). “Don’t let her leave, ’kay? Don’t let her go away again.”

“I won’t,” Leena promises, and because it’s her, Claudia believes it without so much as a second thought.

Myka’s going to stay this time. If she freaks out and wants to run away again, Claudia will totally get that – she won’t like it, but she’ll _get_ it; she really and truly will – but it’s sure as hell not going to go down like it did last time. This time, if she really wants to abandon her friends and her family and her home, if she’s seriously going to try and do that, she’s gonna have to earn it. She’s not allowed to just sneak off without saying goodbye, just leave a note and ride off into the sunset, leaving Claudia cold and scared when the darkness rolls in. Not this time. Hell to the no. This time if she wants out, she’ll have to go through them first, and they will take her the hell down before they let her go.

It’s a pleasant thought, a warm thought; it feels kind of like she’s standing guard, like she’s actually doing something by being here. Like, for once, she’s not just lying on her back and waiting for the world to bend her over and take what it wants from her. She feels like she might actually be able to make a difference this time, like maybe she can help. And not in a sort-of-but-not-quite, more-of-a-hindrance-than-a-help, accidentally-nuking-her-colleague kind of way, but an actually useful way. Like, if it really came down to it this time, maybe she could give Myka a reason to stay. It’s a beautiful feeling, and it mixes headily with the strong weight of Leena’s arm across her shoulders, the sensation and the emotion wrapping themselves around her with so much more effect than the blanket.

And, all of a sudden, she kind of really is falling asleep. Like, really and actually falling into a proper sleep. A real, proper, actual sleep, the kind that can only come with not being scared.

The realisation is startling, so utterly unfathomable to her fear-tainted mind so that it kind of jolts her awake again, and it’s only when Leena gently soothes her that she settles back down.

Because, yeah. _She’s not scared_. Like, really and truly and honestly and sincerely. She’s not scared at all. Her heart is heavy, full like after a big meal, with a kind of unshakeable surety. She knows – she just knows! – that it doesn’t matter if she sleeps, that it’s all right if she can’t stay awake, because Leena is here to keep watch while she rests. Because, even if something happens while she’s sleeping, Leena will be there to deal with it, to fix it, to make it all okay. Because they’re kind of a them now, even if they can’t quite be the kind of ‘them’ that they both sort of want.

And maybe that’s all it means, this ‘not being alone’ thing. Maybe it’s enough to just know that, if the world tries to take Myka away again (or, worse, if it sets its eyes on Claudia’s soul, turns it black and takes her instead), and she can’t stop it, Leena will. Maybe it’s just knowing that she will stand where Claudia stumbles, and that she will keep her standing too.

Between the two of them, Claudia knows, they’ll make sure that Myka’s still there when the morning comes.

It’s the one thing she’s sure of as her mind clouds over, the one certainty that lingers, shining sun-bright even through the looming curtain of sweet, deep sleep – when the sun comes up, they’ll still be here. Her, Leena, Myka. Pete and Artie. All of them.

The circuit has its missing component back. Everything is where it should be, connected, and Claudia can sense its systems pulsing in soft-glowing rhythm behind her eyes.

It’s four-oh-three, and she’s at peace.

**FIN**


End file.
